I’ll be the first to admit that inspiration is not motivation, but one definitely can lead to the other.
As I write these words I just got back from a long March walk. I slipped on my winter shoes, I grabbed my headphones, locked the door behind me and stepped out into the still-snowy paths of a late-February morning. (Yeah, I’m also writing these a week or so ahead of when I post them!)
I went out looking for inspiration.
I had sat down to write something before even deciding to go on a walk and I got stuck. My brain froze up. The Blankwraith crept into my head and froze up my thinker, fingers hovering over the keyboard in empty headed paralysis.
But then, simple as it sounds, within five minutes of stepping out the door something loosened up and the ideas started flowing. I’ll write in a future post about the importance of carrying a note-taking tool, but needless to say I opened mine, still within sight of my house, and started jotting.
My walk lasted an hour. I did a loop around our local suburban neighborhood, trudging through the sloppy, icy sidewalks. And every couple of minutes I would pull out my notes and add another sentence or two to the stack.
I counted. I had jotted down thirty-two unique ideas.
By the time I got home and walked in the door, my biggest concern wasn’t lack of ideas but lack of time to get them turned into little two hundred word essays.
I went for a walk looking for inspiration and it turns out they were hanging out just down the street.
Terms FROm this POSt
- inspiration
- A vague concept I mention frequently in my writing but rarely pause to define, I think the notion of being inspired is really at the foundational level, the seeds of creativity. Without inspiration, without muse, without spark creativity is just work or repetition or rote effort. Inspiration does not necessarily need to be monumental or epic or of the highest quality, but rather it is what is at the start of every creative process …until it flowers and drops more seeds of inspiration and the cycle repeats.
- keyboard
- Maybe it’s for typing. Maybe it’s for coding. Maybe it’s for making music. A bed of buttons arrayed for digital input is my favourite user interface and I’ll write about them often in their many varieties.
- winter
- Where I come from this season isn’t just a metaphor for something, nor is it an abstraction linked to a romantic holiday snowfall. Rather it is a deep months-long freeze that restricts travel and keeps us hiding in our homes for nearly half the year. Many of us embrace it, but the reality is that cold is cold is cold and it is limiting as much as it inspires.
