Back from the Holidays. Something new.

I’ve been easing my way back into the creative zone post Christmas break. No big reset. Just quietly looking for the groove.

One of the practices I’ve started to engage with is intriguingly simple.

Set a timer for 30 seconds.
Scribble without thinking.
Rotate the page.
Sit with whatever shows up.

That’s where my latest YouTube Short comes from. It’s just the scribble, the rotation, and a question: what do you see?

I already see something in it. I’m keeping that to myself for now.

This exercise worked well for me. It sets the commitment bar so low that my system stops resisting. There’s no demand for “good.” No pressure to embark on an epic journey. Just one frictionless step into the flow.

Vigilance vs. Coherence

Lately, I’ve been trying to understand why, even when I want to make art, I drift toward the doomscroll. I’ve talked it through with the council: Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT. The same tension keeps surfacing: awareness versus immersion.

Caring about what’s happening in the world isn’t wrong. But the platforms we use blur the line between staying informed and becoming emotionally saturated. The endless scroll keeps my body in a low-grade state of vigilance, quietly draining the energy needed to respond in any meaningful way.

Art asks for something different. Not vigilance, but coherence.

Vigilance is a survival posture. It’s the state my body slips into when it believes something might go wrong at any moment. My attention fragments. I scan constantly. I’m alert, reactive, and tense. Social feeds are engineered to keep me here. Every headline, outrage post, or warning trains my nervous system to stay braced, as if danger is always just one swipe away. Vigilance feels like engagement, but it’s mostly defense.

Coherence, by contrast, is integration. Instead of my attention being pulled outward in a hundred directions, it gathers. My thoughts line up. Sensation, emotion, and intention start to agree with one another. I’m not ignoring the world. I’m actually able to hold it without being torn apart by it. Coherence is what allows meaning to form.

In vigilance, everything feels urgent but nothing is workable. In coherence, fewer things demand attention, but what remains becomes usable.

Art depends on coherence. I can’t make something when my mind is scattered and my body is braced. Making requires a kind of internal alignment, where perception slows enough for patterns to emerge. That’s why small practices like a 30 second scribble work. They gently shift me out of threat scanning and into a state where pieces can connect.

The feed feels like an uncompressed mess. Endless. Bloated. Too much to hold all at once. Making something runs that mess through a compressor. A 30 second scribble is radical compression. A day’s worth of noise collapsed into a handful of lines.

When I rotate the page and soften my gaze, something shifts. Feelings I didn’t know I was having can surface.

If you watched the Short and something jumped out at you, I’d genuinely like to know what you see.