The Life of Ideas
Lately I have been fascinated with the sensitive nature and life cycles of ideas. In my experience, there are three types. For the purpose of this blog, let’s call them: the good, the bad, and the lovely.
There are ideas that as a general rule of thumb tend to be, universally bad: like getting a fringe, pineapple on pizza, telling your wife/girlfriend/sister that she’s over reacting. Then there are those which are “bad” simply because they are fear or self-sabotage camouflaged as such. They usually occur when you feel undeserving, when an outbreak of good luck has left you feeling vulnerable and as though you need to hustle more. Maybe I should start this project all over again; Maybe I shouldn’t tell my boss that I want a raise; Maybe I should leave this idea for a time when I have my life pulled together.
The “good” ideas come to us after dinner with inspiring friends; a talk that we saw the flier for and dragged along; after the pang of envy for the twenty-four year old woman who started her own business; when we wake up too early in a new town but find ourselves surprisingly energised and suddenly life is brimming with infinite possibilities. These ones are often disguised as daydreaming, the self-indulgent roam of our imaginations. Sometimes they feel bigger than us, as though they are out of our league.
They are born in the right part of our brains and often crashed by the left one, the ant-hill logistics, the pragmatics. Yeah, it would be lovely to move to Australia for a few months, but where would we find the money from? I’d love to write a book, but I just don’t have the time.
It’s hard for us to tell that in that train of thought, there, hidden in coach D, the left window seat might be a passenger that if we dare to meet, might change our lives forever.
Then, there are the type of ideas that we recognise as such. They pull us with such intensity that we allow ourselves to be held and lifted, gifted invisible wings while entertaining them. These ideas come abruptly, give us a rush of adrenaline and make our palms sweat, our feet: cold. Excited, we take a pen, a pad nearby and start jotting. We already see our lives transforming, finally coming closer to the version that feels a bit more like the one we imagined for ourselves back when we were teenagers, naïve and unafraid to dream.
We return to our mundane routines, changed, empowered, superior to who we were before. Simply because inside of us we have an ally, a secret, sacred idea that tends to our hopes and paints the way to our aspirations. It hums while we wash the dishes, winks at us, while we greet the cashier in our neighbourhood bakery.
A day passes and then two. We get bogged down in life admin, we get distracted and hit by “reality”. We’re busy and we don’t have the time to sit with our notepad, let our imagination dance with the idea, our pen waltz with the vision. It feels like wasting time. It doesn’t feel like work. What’s the point? The connection between us and the idea slowly goes cold, like a forgotten cup of tea; retreats to where it came from like a cuckoo from a pendulum clock after noon has passed.
And that, my friend, is real tragedy. It isn’t not having any new ideas. It isn’t having “bad” ones. It isn’t even stealing somebody else’s. It is forgetting how enchanted you were at the start. It is letting yourself unwilfully walk away. It is turning away from the passenger who’s now on the platform holding a sign that has something scribbled on it. And although you can’t see from the distance, it looks like your name.
