Card #50 – ”Pause for A Bit” from the Creative Whack Pack

Available on the iOS App Store and as a physical deck of cards

Poet Doug King on the value of incubating: “Learn to pause . . . or nothing worthwhile will ever catch up to you.”

Sometimes getting away from the problem you’re working on and turning it over to the active powers of your unconscious can be the best strategy of all.

The classic example of “getting away” is Archimedes, the third-century BC Greek mathematician and ballistic weapons designer.

Archimedes was asked by his king to determine the purity of a gold crown that was suspected of being adulterated with silver by the crown’s goldsmith.

Archimedes was given this constraint: since the crown was a holy object, he had to rule out solutions such as melting it or hammering it into a measurable cube.

After several frustrating weeks of thinking about the problem, Archimedes was stymied. He decided to get away from the problem altogether by going to the public baths. There he watched absent-mindedly while the water rose with the immersion of his body into the tub.

Suddenly inspiration dawned: why not use the same immersion process with the crown? Because gold is denser than silver, Archimedes realized that the water would not rise as high for a solid gold crown as for one containing silver.

It was this solution that led him to run naked through the streets yelling, “Eureka!” Pausing for a bit had been the stimulus.

Allow the Muse to whisper in your ear!

— How would your problem benefit if you paused for a day or a week?