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 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.