Thinking Rooms: On Creativity, Care, and the Quiet Work of Home
I’ve often wondered where thinking truly happens. Not the grand kind—the one that fills boardrooms and seminar halls—but the quieter kind that unfolds between stirring a pot of dal and folding the laundry. For quite a time, I was of the opinion that solitude alone can bring pondering deep enough to go to the roots of the problem. A table. A door to shut. A person who is never distracted. Virginia Woolf once remarked that if a woman wants to write novels, she must have money and a room of her own. I interpreted that sentence as a wishful, even desperate, demand for space that most of us have in common and still is hard to get. However, as the years went by, it became clear to me that the feminine creativity, in particular, was not so much waiting for ideal conditions but rather struggling to be born in bits—often between errands and during brief pauses, in places that were taken rather than given. Home, the place often regarded as unremarkable, is where the constant flow of new ideas co...
