We hoarde ideas so we don’t have to deal with the blank page. And we accumulate, store, and organize those ideas.
Some of us are better at this than others. If you are like me, then you are a vacuum. Nothing is sacred. You swallow the world around you like a renegade sink hole.
Books, articles, videos, movies, songs, images, conversations. The best of us can’t keep up with it all. It is the back of a cereal box at breakfast. An American Scientific article in the bathroom. A TED talk while you sit in your dentist’s chair.
Then there’s the stack of notebooks. The stack of notecards. Napkins and sheets of paper covered with drawings, concepts, and objectives stuffed into a leather legal portfolio.
Yet we still stare at the blank page. Disabled in the face of so much material. Material that seems, after re-reading, weird at best. Wasn’t there something more profound than this?
Possibly it is still in your head. Buried. All you need to do is kick up the dirt. By picking up your journal or opening your laptop and writing: “I had this idea. Now it doesn’t seem very good, but there was something else … oh, yeah ….”
A page later and a catalog of good ideas are marching toward you. A page later and a catalog of ideas are forming a circle around you.
Here’s the moral of the story: trust the process. The mind engaged will pillage the ideas in your head. It’s an act of discovery. And the act of writing initiates it.
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Image source: Smith-Corona
