I’ve never been a fan of the term “writers’ block.” While I do believe there are times in a writer’s life that the words don’t come so easily, or perhaps not at all, I don’t know if I consider the phase a complete block. Instead, I think our mind does a great deal of work when we’re not writing, work that leads to writing when the timing is right.

In my own writing practice, I have come to enjoy, or at least appreciate, those moments when I can’t settle in at my desk. Most often, those are the times I am busy in other facets of my life that the restlessness I feel has more to do with being overly busy and burdened, and thus less conducive to creativity, than having a lack of creative flow. Those times, I feel the desire to sit down, the compulsion to put words on a page, but external circumstances keep me fidgeting about with to-dos and other demands.

What I have come to respect about those moments where writing seems like the last thing on my mind, is that I have learned to believe my mind is actually thinking about writing. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, words and ideas are at play, even when I am not.

Thinking is as much a part of the creative process as physically putting words on paper. Not thinking is also important, for it is in those quiet moments that my brain has the permission to breathe, to let new thoughts form, to let abstractions become creative impulses.

When I embrace the quiet or the frazzled obstacles,  whichever the case may be, I know I give myself permission to focus on whatever else life requires of me—with the proven promise that words will always come, when I’m ready for them.

Writing may or may not be like riding a bike, but there is something to the process that allows our minds to wander and penning-hands to take a break, with the know-how that when we sit down and let them, the words will come.