As I admired the Hawaiian sunset from a fourth-floor balcony, I let out a deep sigh. I watched warm waves of golden rays reflecting off the shimmering sea and the furthest thing from my mind was the fact that only a simple slat railing stood between me and the ground below. When it did strike me, the realization was jarring enough that I turned my attention away from the sunset and to the thin metal bars against which I’d been leaning.

The fact that I hadn’t noticed the railing before leaning on it wasn’t surprising. Many guards, nets, bumpers, and barriers go virtually unnoticed by our conscious minds every single day. Our brains are constantly filtering the things we must know, like when we see something new or unexpected, from those things we recognize and can brush off as patterns, habits, routine, and commonplace. Balcony railings — as important as they are — generally fall into the latter category, and are rarely acknowledged unless it’s because they’re missing.

Therein lies the rub for quilters.

Because the part of our brains that takes a physical barrier for granted while watching a sunset is the same part that overlooks the mental walls and crutches we lean upon to make our daily creative decisions. And for anyone who creates — be it making art, writing novels, developing products, or sewing a quilt — ignoring your walls can lead to ruts. Blocks. Boredom. Or worse, burnout.

For quilters whose lifelong journey includes pushing past personal limits, such ruts can be troubling. We work hard to develop our technical abilities, our creativity, and our capacity to love and give with each quilt. Yet our potential to advance is often hindered by the unacknowledged patterns of our own thinking. Our belief in our abilities and our limitations stems largely from how things have been and not from what they could be. While our tendency to trust and adhere to patterns may often simplify life, it can also be an effective recipe for ruts — one our subconscious whips up daily.

Writer Samuel Johnson put it this way: “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken” —a rather fatalistic view of our difficulty to recognize ingrained thoughts and behavior. Author Agatha Christie added: “Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.”

But does it have to be that way?

My antidote to the inevitable creative doldrums is to double down and focus on discovery. By definition, to discover something means to “make it known or visible.” To acknowledge it. To see it for the first time. Like my noticing the railing on the balcony, discovery does not require that things be new, only that they be new to us. Finally seen. Finally considered.