Ideas

Yesterday, I had an idea. Not a great one, but an idea that I would do something to prepare myself for a longer term task. I would pack my things in advance of a departure.
I found a fairly large suitcase, which would accommodate the materials I needed for this voyage of sorts. Clothing, Camera, personal items, and some electronic gizmos. After all, part of my work in life, has been to document moments. Aural and visual.

So I packed. From a faulty memory. Once again, I’d left out several items that I would need. This time it was a book for writing my poetry, my journal, my lyric book. Those sheets of paper bound together that comprise my closer held existence within its covers. And I forgot to pack my vitamins. My idea was pretty good. Prepare. My ability to store the details of that idea, were not so good. It had a mental form, but not anywhere near the substance I needed, to make it work to completion. What it lacked, was a written outline.

Ideas are like candy, sweets, as it were, without substance in fact. You can formulate an idea and it will become concrete in your mind, and perhaps your companion’s mind, but it remains a picture, without substance. Some people can create an idea so strongly, that people around them will see and feel the object, as if it WERE real, that is the domain of the mind, only.

How can this be? How can one person, relate an idea to another, and it is so powerful, that the ears of the receiver, transform that idea into a real, living, often vibrating with vitality, object? Some people are so filled with ideas, that they overflow onto other people, and once in a while, one of those people will connect with them or their ideas and go on to create those ideas.

First let’s ask, where these or any ideas, come from?

Secondly, what makes an idea seem real?

Thirdly, at what point does an idea become a solid bit of creation in your mind, so that the nails, and plastic and wood of that idea, are the next logical step?

Ideas, in their purest form, come from a fertile and creative mind….like a farmer’s field, that has good dark, brown loam in it, a mind draws upon the nutrients of its soil to grow things. Some are weeds, which grow quickly, but are of no use in a production or harvest, and others….those that bring forth fruit.

The fruit are, or is, as it were, useful in our careers, our hobbies, or even help other people. Some people have so many ideas, that their minds seem to hold rapid and concurrent multiple conversations. They can think outside the box as if it were the norm. And they tend to seek artistic forms of employment. A mind that is the milk and meat of existence, provokes both support and opposition, oft-times to the same idea, from vastly different people and perspectives. But creative and original minds find not only good in objects that the rest of us pass by, but good in people that we also pass. One person’s handicap, is another’s specialty. A man born without arms, learns to play the guitar with his feet, and plays one day for a world leader. His drawback became his primary creative force. All he needed was the idea and incipient desire to succeed. He created, within the mind, the world that he needed to make his plan work. And it did.

Our minds do generate the worlds in which our ideas would flourish. We create, not only the idea, but dozens of them simultaneously, surrounding the original seed with the soil it needs to grow. It seems real, because we built a world, a cosmos to sustain it.

Your idea, my idea, may well be bits and figments of our own imaginations, and only exist in the virtual world, so much like Second Life…and simply die the death of forgetfulness, to be replaced by another seed. But then, once in a while, one of those ideas, becomes a macrocosm, a single flame, germinating. When and why does this happen?

Each of us sees merit to one idea or another, a big picture view. We see that idea in terms of the materials available to build it. And sometimes, materials that don’t exist. A bridge, a museum, concert hall. A beautiful car, violin, guitar, a wheelchair for a marathon, a cure for breast cancer. We take that idea and begin to dig out the pieces of puzzle that will construct that idea into being, and the world in which it will collect meaning, and that seed, that cosmos, begins to take form.

Other people now see it. It is not necessary for anyone but you, to believe in that idea. But you have to be willing, cognizant of the great obstacles you must surmount, if your idea is to come to reality, to endure, ridicule, hard examination, and mountains of obstacles. Prototypical or mass produced, you idea must capture the imagination you have, from others, for its future to have a chance.

It it were not for ideas, we would not have light at the darkest hours, transportation at supersonic speeds, delicacies from around the world, nor the keyboard, on which I so effortlessly type this essay. Ideas have been the backbone of progress for the last 7,000 years of recorded history. If we are to succeed in the coming years, ideas must flow freely, without constraint, or we will regress as we have in times past. The destruction of the library of Alexandria and other more recent suppression of men’s thoughts are highly recognized examples. Ideas, however foreign to our way of thinking, are necessary to balance one side or the other on an intellectual playing field. Time has a way of even-ing things out, so that ideas that have merit, will get to the surface, and become part of history. Part of our lives, useful and productive.