Where Are All The Great Ideas?

Every day is a deluge.

We navigate conversations. We encounter pedestrians and coworkers and grocery store cashiers and friends. We register challenges at work and home and within our own psyches. We scan headlines. Note the change of season. Fall into memories and dream into futures. 

Both our inner and outer landscapes are constantly turning our head. Giving us pause. Requesting our attention. Demanding our response.

We’re left with a hundred reactions. Two hundred observations. A handful of grievances. A dozen solutions.

And yet time and again, when we sit to create, we feel we’re out of ideas.

Because even as life turns our heads this way and that, evoking innumerable thoughts and emotions, we look past it. 

We keep our eyes on the horizon. Waiting for the GREAT idea. The CLEVER idea. The GROUNDBREAKING idea. The RELEVANT idea.

All this other stuff? It feels way too specific. Arbitrary. Pointless. Mundane. EMBARRASSING!

Sometimes we dismiss it for the very FACT of it being in front of us!

Everything changes when we see these head turns for exactly what they are: inspiration!

These are the urgencies for us to harness. These are the questions for us to answer. These are the essences for us to distill.

THIS is our creative fodder!

THIS is the content that, thrown into the cauldron of our creativity, will emerge as that GREAT, that CLEVER, that GROUNDBREAKING, that RELEVANT work we’ve always longed to make.

Great art isn’t superhuman. 

Great art is using the actual stuff of our lives to articulate our humanity.