Boost Your Creativity by Getting Weird With Raisins

How would you describe a raisin to someone who has never seen one before? Would you send them a photo and say “It’s a grape that someone left in the sun until it dried out”? Is there a more complete way to get across the essence of a raisin?

Mindfulness exercises can be silly and playful. When you experience something fully, you can describe it more accurately. In this case, we’ll be touching, tasting, watching, smelling, and even listening to a humble raisin.

If you Google “raisin meditation,” you’ll find a slew of videos on YouTube that are unintentionally hilarious. People take raisins and rub them on their hands and faces, contemplating everything from their ridges to their colour, treating these bad, dry little grapes like a lover. From the outside, it’s easy to laugh and move on.

If you made it this far, you’re creative and willing to make a fool of yourself to come up with ideas. Take that raisin (or really any other small food) and dive into investigating it. Can you write about a raisin well enough to describe it to a blind person? No? Then rub it on your face until you can.

The trick to techniques like this is to let go, laugh, and play like a child would. You can bet that any kid has put rocks, sand, toy airplanes, or the cat’s tail into their mouth to investigate the new thing they’ve discovered. Kids will roll paint all over themselves, or play with toys based solely on their texture. Get back in that hyper-plastic modality and really play with your food.

Here’s my take on a raisin:

Raisins feel like fingers after a long bath. 
They vary from golden brown to rich, deep plum in colour. 
You almost wonder how they were grapes. 
They sound like the room you're in, or the ocean — if you're by the ocean. 
They smell warm and sweet, like Christmas. 
They're vaguely floral when you pop them in your mouth, 
and the flesh separates in soft layers, sticking to your incisors.  
If you wait before chewing, they start to rehydrate in your mouth, 
morphing back into loose spheres, like tiny water balloons. 
The sugars stimulate saliva, and even though you don't normally 
eat raisins, after having one you kind of want 
to shove a fistful into your face — for science, of course.

This week’s challenge:

• Follow these steps and do your own raisin meditation. I left out the post-credit digestion scene, because you don’t want to read that.
• Note which parts of the exercise are useful to you. Listening to a raisin is pretty futile, but for other subjects that level of detail can be useful.