Songline Running

You’re a creative type? Love the buzz of that busy mind bursting forth new ideas? Of course! There’s only one little hiccup; a bug in the cranial software. It’s called ‘conscience’.

This little pest insists on telling you you should be exercising (just when you thought you’d mastered the fabulously healthy skill of dismissing all ‘shoulds’).  It gnaws at you with the ‘exercise’ message, ensuring you faintly recall a virtuous feeling you had when you did some years ago. But a huge groan keeps pace with conscience, fuelling an ongoing battle for songwriters like me, who are notorious for not exercising anything other than the mind. Until now.

Today,  a new sport, Songline Running, invented itself. And it’s not the regular sport of running with headphones on.  It goes like this:

You take up Songline Running, (having a name for something always helps).  In your first session, totally new, (and, you tell yourself, ‘vastly better’), songlines run through your mind as you run – (and, you tell yourself, this is the only way they come in at this level). Even miniature runs yield this quality of creative occurrences.  I call my miniature runs ‘shuffles’ …

Then follows the best bit. You treat yourself with the well deserved REWARD – (you might need to picture the reward before you begin, to get you out the door in the first place). And the reward is? Vastly better songlines of course, (or poetry if you’re a poet, novel ideas if you’re a novelist, and so on). You get to slam all that breakthrough, higher level brilliance into your songwriting software the moment you get home. Athletes call this a ‘warm down’ – you see them stretching in all sorts of gangly poses after the run. But for we ‘arteests’ the best ‘warm down’ is to ‘get it down’ … I’ve just completed my first Songline Run and I couldn’t wait to tell you!  I’m FULL of world-shattering new ideas.

Next time I post a song, you’ll be so impressed you’ll immediately take up the sport yourself, (that is, unless you’re already impressed with this triumphant little article, in which case, you’ll take up the sport now). OK. I’ve warmed down getting this all down. And I’ve popped those gorgeous new lines into my songwriting software, which I reckon is thanking me. Now it’s time for brekkies.