Searching for yourself is a journey with no destination. — me. Just now.

I get up a 5:30 every morning. To get myself ready, make sure the dog does his duty, and get on a commuter van for a forty minute ride into ‘the city.’ I imagine coaxing a sleepy Beagle out of the blankets is similar to rousing belligerent children from their beds. I have the benefit of being able to physically move the world’s most existential Beagle if I so choose.

It’s always a rush. The shake-to-snooze on my iPhone it overly tempting. Getting lost in my iPhone before even crawling out of bed is a distraction. Catching up on the world that hardly affects me is serious business at oh-dark-thirty. Deciding on what to take for lunch (meat and cheese usually), what to have to breakfast (cottage cheese most days) takes more time than it really should.

The rush is life. It’s how I live most days, compounded when I have to coax a bleary-eyed existential beagle out into the rain to add his own moisture to an bursting, saturated ground. Rush through the shower, rush prepping breakfast. Oh, Christ is it garbage day? Rush to get the garbage out. All while trying to decide what podcast to listen to on the way into work. Back To Work with Merlin Mann (and Dan Benjamin). Garbage day is the day after they record. Rush through twenty minutes of comic book and The Aviator talk before they get to a real topic.

On days when I don’t have to work, things are different. On days when I decide to slow down, things are very different.

It took me almost twenty years to realize I am more creative, happier, and at ease when I can settle into the day slowly. Starbucks is how I settle in slowly. The brand of coffee shop isn’t important (though Dunkin’ Donuts is NOT sufficient). The time to order coffee, stir in the requisite Splenda and skim milk, find a tall chair in a mocha-inspired decor is what settles me.

It doesn’t take long to drink a cup of coffee. Hardly half an hour. I can spend it obsessing over my not-quite-pop-tart-sized-iPhone, or like this, committing bytes to the cloud. It is the act of getting away from home, into an environment that I (rightly or wrongly) associate with creativity that sets me at ease for the rest of the day.

I’ve wondered at times if I am mildly ADD, wondered if the caffeine acts like a small dose of Ritalin to set my mind at ease. I’m not mildly ADD (if anything I have an Attention Surplus Disorder). I usually consume my caffeine in the form of Diet Mountain Dew (damnable nectar of angry and spiteful gods), so that idea is right out the window as well.

I think what it comes down to is I have a sense of the creative in the morning. The rush consumes all of the space needed for that sense to be satisfied. Creativity is fed by whatever nourishes it, even when that nourishment is as cliched as drinking coffee in a pastel drenched den of corporate marketing. Creativity isn’t rational, and I wouldn’t want to live in a world where it was. The rush is rational. The rush is goal to goal to goal.

It’s taken me twenty years to embrace the irrational. It’s taken me twenty years to embrace the journey rather than the destination. It’s taken me twenty years to let go and just let creativity happen. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take that long for you.