A busy morning, a gaggle of gentlemen, the sound of traffic loudly impresses its presence as each person struggles to hear one another over the ambient sounds. There is one difference today to their meeting… they talk as if they were back in the French Salons of the early 18th century. Amongst them are the great minds of the enlightenment who together in a soup of genius spawned many of the fundamental ideas that built the foundation of today’s society. We call these ideas inspired, and the men, genius for they certainly were, but there was something else that they often don’t talk about and we are rarely aware of it.
As we look back at these men and their creations, many of these inspired ideas did not come from a single source, but in fact from a plethora of ideas spun together over countless hours of idea pondering with their peers, past and present. We often find ourselves ruminating over a thought and then we speak to someone about something unrelated and we creak open another moment closer to realizing the truth of our insight. We read or hear something and our minds open themselves again to it even more. The idea is like Michelangelo’s David, Mike always saw him there in the stone but instead of the hand of the great maestro our ideas come from a thousand hands chipping away at revealing the idea until finally it is revealed by the one man who laid the seed.
Your creativity is literally mental intercourse. It is bringing together two separate ideas from different sources and having them intermingle and spawn a new modified version of the idea. Then from another source an idea comes along and again infuses and impregnates to create another and even more unique form. This may go on and on over time, you are constantly nurturing an idea, this time instead of in a belly, it is inside your mind. It changes form, becoming completely unrecognizable from when you first had the seed of the thought, but you love it even more. Finally without even realizing it, you feel something snap, it comes rushing like water but its something else. It comes unexpectedly but you knew it lay on the horizons… The idea you’d been waiting for!!! How wonderful.
A feeling of elation comes over you and you are filled with such hope and excitement for what lies before this new thing that you have birthed. And so we must give thanks as we remember that it is through our mental intercourse and our mutual respect and love for our peers, past, present and future that they too are the shared progenitors of the ideas that we spawn.
And by the way, once we birth the idea then we have to give to get it up on its feet…………………………… But that’s a whole other story!
Making the ideas is the hard part. Trying your upmost to create something in the image of that crystal clear vision that presented itself to you.
Hi Kiz. Thanks for your sharing your thoughts. Turning the amorphous ideas of our mind into something solid that exists in the real world is fraught with its own bag of challenges. I liken this to rearing the child. Once you have birthed the idea it then comes down to tending and nurturing the idea ever vigilantly. Early mornings, sleepless nights, constant care, set backs and unexpected trips to the emergency ward just to ensure that it keeps together but eventually the idea will thrive and come into its own. Able to survive without your ever-present eye. And again it isn’t just you and your idea and efforts that will bring your idea into fruition but will take many hands to help and many hands to thank and acknowledge.