Nearly eight years ago, I quit a desk job I was working and immediately set out to become a writer. To foot the bill on my pipe dream, I got part-time work at a place called Paint & Carpet Depot in Evansville, Indiana for $15/ hour cash.

My first day on the job, my boss handed me a gnarly looking box-cutter, a roll of duct tape so thick it could hog-tie a grizzly, a pair of keys to a white cargo van and an address scribbled on the back of a mangled envelope.

30-minutes later, I arrived alone at a badly dated home with dingy, dilapidated carpet covering all of its 3,000 square feet.

For the better part of 5 hours, I tore the carpet from the floor, rolled it into thick burritos, duct-taped its mouth shut, hoisted it over my shoulders and then carried it off to the company van.

I spent an entire year of my life like this, laboring away alone in strange homes and apartment buildings. While I didn’t know it at the time, I was developing a crucial (but often overlooked) creative muscle.

The late, great poet Mary Oliver once wrote about the importance of solitude to the creative process.

In Upstream she writes…

“

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart––to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

”

When I clocked-out for the day at Paint & Carpet Depot and it was time to trade-out my box-cutter for my pencil, I found it more comfortable to be alone and far easier to concentrate on the creative work at hand.

Not unlike a fox hunting a rabbit in the snow, writing requires the writer to pursue an idea to the far reaches of their mind’s eye in full, uninterrupted concentration.

If you can’t learn how to be comfortable being alone, it can be damn difficult to weather the cold.

By Cole Schafer.

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