Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal. ​ #whensciencefeelslikemagic

Toni Morrison made make coffee while is was still dark. This mattered. "It must be dark," she said, and she drank it watching the light rise up.

Her iconic writing ritual began as pure survival (small children, full-time job). Her only free time was before her kids woke up. Even after her life changed, she kept this daily habit: waking up in the dark, making coffee, and watching the sun rise.

She viewed this quiet time as a deeply spiritual preparation to get into a writing zone, famously noting it was "not being in the light, it's being there before it arrives".

She was preparing room for her gift.

Sometimes your best thinking rarely happens where you’ve scheduled it.
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The conference room with the whiteboard and the timer that’s where you process. Where you synthesize and perform and keep the thread. Valuable, sure. But your paradigm shifting ideas? The aaaah-ha? That came while staring out the window. On the walk. At 5:14 a.m. on the mat, or the porcelain throne (tee-hee).
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What if you examined this? Consider: Isabel Allende starts every single book on January 8th, the date she began The House of the Spirits in 1981 as a letter to her dying grandfather. She lights a candle each morning, walks the seventeen steps to her writing room "scared. And excited." Every year. Same date. Same candle. Same seventeen stairs.A
nd Mary Oliver, who stitched a 3×5 notebook by hand, walked every morning at dawn, and after once getting caught without a pen, stashed pencils in the trees along her routes so she’d never be stranded mid-thought again. Pencils. In the trees.
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These expansive thinkers built what I’d call architectures of attention. Structures so so specific that their thinking mind could relax into them. Morrison’s dark kitchen. Allende’s seventeen stairs. Kusama’s 10 a.m. walk across the street. Oliver’s pencil-studded woods.
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Octavia Butler put it in plain English: "Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not." And Agnes Martin sat in her chair , sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks with what she called "a vacant mind," waiting for a fully-formed image to arrive. Then she painted it.
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Butler came full. Martin came empty. Both left with the their work.
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How do you do your best thinking? Where does it happen? What are the conditions? What’s the temperature of the room, the quality of the light? As important: what’s absent?
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The neuroscience now backs up exactly what these women practiced for decades. The conditions matter. And they’re designable.

Your brain runs two major networks that matter here, and the interplay between them is where creative cognition lives.
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The first is the default mode network — the constellation of brain regions that hums to life when external demands drop away. It’s what activates when you stare out a window, take a walk with no podcast, sit with your coffee before the inbox. It governs spontaneous thought, memory retrieval, mental simulation. It’s the wandering mind and it’s doing real, measurable work.
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The second is the executive control network, the system that evaluates, selects, refines. It’s the part that takes the raw ore of an idea and asks: is this sound? can this work? what needs to change?
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A 2025 multi-center study led by Qunlin Chen and Roger Beaty analyzed brain imaging and creative task performance across 2,433 participants in ten independent samples from five countries. Their finding was precise: creative ability could be reliably predicted by the number of switches between the default mode network and the executive control network. The more fluidly your brain toggled between spontaneous generation and controlled evaluation, the more original your thinking. General intelligence didn’t predict it. The switching did (Chen et al., 2025, Communications Biology; PMID: 39809882).
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(Which is a rather elegant way of saying: your best ideas come from a brain that knows how to daydream and how to grab the good ideas before they dissolve.)
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What Morrison, Allende, Kusama, and Oliver were doing with their rituals: the dark kitchen, the candle, the 10 a.m. walk, the pencils stashed in trees, was engineering the conditions for exactly this neural state. A structured container (the habit, the ritual, the time of day) that frees the mind to wander inside it. Habit and happenstance, working.
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Too little switching you get a mind locked in daydream or locked in evaluation, produced less creative work. Too much switching, frantic toggling, no rhythm produced less, too. The peak was in the middle. Balanced oscillation. A mind that could linger in the fog and then, at the right moment, crystallize.

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the practice
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You’ve already had sparks of genius. Zenith insights. I know you, friend. Pick three. Maybe five. The ideas that actually moved you toward something or were in service of the collective: a decision that clarified the next steps, a intuition that opened doors, a solution that turning into something physical. Go back to them. And for each one, reconstruct the conditions:
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where were you? Inside or outside. Which room. What chair. Were you moving or still.
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when was it? Early light or late dark. Midday haze. The strange productive pocket after everyone else fell asleep. Tuesday. Sunday. The 45 minutes between meetings when you should have been preparing for the next one.
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what were you doing with your body? Dancing. Painting. Showering. Lying on the floor. Hands in dirt or hands in dishwater. Sitting so still.
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who was nearby? No one. A room full of strangers. One specific person. The kitty-cat.
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what was the texture of your attention? Focused or drifting. Purposeful or aimless. Were you trying to think about this, or did it interrupt something else entirely?
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what was happening in your mind? Quiet or churning. Were you in problem-solving mode or had you genuinely let go of the thing? Was your thinking verbal — words, sentences — or something more spatial, imagistic, felt?
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what were you feeling? Calm or restless. Grieving or grateful. Bored. Playful. A particular shade of melancholy that sometimes opens a door nothing else can reach. The emotional weather matters more than most people credit.
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what did you want? Were you hungry for the answer, or had you surrendered the search? Sometimes the will grips a question so tightly that nothing can get through. Sometimes the wanting itself is the fuel. Notice which one was true for you.
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Write it down. Longhand if you can, pen-to-paper engages motor regions that slow cognition enough for you to actually notice the pattern.

Because there will be a pattern. Maybe your best thinking happens in motion. Maybe it happens in the bath at 11 p.m. eating an apple (Agatha Christie solved murders this way, which should give you permission that whatever it is, its yours). Maybe it requires silence, or maybe it requires the specific ambient noise of a café where you’re incognito or one where everybody knows your name.o.

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p.s. Reader, your pattern is your architecture. And once you can see it, you can build it on purpose. Stop waiting for the right conditions to stumble into you. Reverse-engineer them. Then protect them like they matter. Because if thoughts become things, they do.