A mole lived underground. Every morning he woke with one dream: to see the sky. He would look up at the ceiling of his tunnel and think, one day I will see the sky.

His neighbors shook their heads. "There is no sky," they said. "There is only dirt. The sky is brown. Be grateful for what you can reach."

Then one day a rabbit traveler passed through the mole community. "The sky is not brown," the rabbit said. "The sky is green. I have seen it myself."

The mole felt his heart pound. He gathered his courage and asked, "Can I come with you?"

So he went.

Well, that was a week.

I went to Washington, D.C. to give a paper at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) conference and do research at the Smithsonian. The research is for Sway, my book arguing that promotion didn't just circulate American music, it shaped artists' images, legacies, and sometimes the music itself. The Ellington chapter is that argument made concrete, and Ellington's archives are at the National Museum of American History in D.C. So I went early. I got back in the stacks.

It started at the Lincoln Memorial at dawn and ended at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on a Saturday afternoon. In between: five days of archive work, a major conference presentation, and an NPR Tiny Desk story I'm still thinking about.

Let me take you through it.

It’s been one of those days. You are creatively blocked. No juices flowing. No ideas. Your mind spins in an endless loop, going nowhere. The canvas stays blank. The strings on your guitar sound flat. The cursor blinks at you with a sneer.

This is what creative paralysis feels like. Being locked inside your skull, unable to move.

I want to suggest an age old solution to your creative block: go on a walk.

There’s an old saying, attributed to the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic: solvitur ambulando. “It is solved by walking.”

We all know walking is good for us. If you spend your days at a desk, you’ve been told to stand more, to stretch, to “get in your steps.” But walking isn’t just exercise. It is fuel for creativity.

The legend says artists must suffer. That fame and fortune come only after death. That struggle is always noble, and successful artists always sell out.

That’s nonsense.

In 1850, Jenny Lind stepped off a ship into New York Harbor and into a nation already obsessed with her. She was a soprano from Sweden, called "The Swedish Nightingale."

The Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, was the most famous singer of her generation.

She had never performed in the United States, and she was already the most famous singer in America.

How?

Because she didn’t come alone. She came with a strategy—and with P.T. Barnum.