Sometimes, an outside source, however grave, can topple our routines and drive us to inspiration.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after a volcano eruption led to a frosty summer and three years of famine, epidemics, political revolts, and a pandemic. (Squirrel! Cue great song about that: “1816, The Year Without A Summer”). During a plague, Isaac Newton laid the groundwork for his theories of gravity and optics, and invented calculus. William Shakespeare wrote some of his best poems when plague forced London’s theaters closed.
And I learned to watercolor paint under quarantine.
The COVID-19 shelter-in-place directive forced me to stop doing whatever mundane tasks usually slurped my time and shoved my creative yearnings to the tippy top of my to-do lists.
It somehow gave me license to relax. To get creative. To piddle.