Beaches & Horizons
Find yourself stranded on a scorching hot beach with a problem on the horizon.
Solve your problem by wading into a brainstorming session.
Successful brainstorming comes with the caveat to treat each idea as if it’s workable. Throw ideas as if you skip stones.
You create a quandary. Too many ideas make it tough to choose just one. Your goal is to take a skipping stone and change it into a stepping stone. Which idea is the one, the one that displays the most potential? Or has your session yielded paltry, unremarkable, crummy, or unusable results?
Properly humbled, you followed the rules. You’ve lowered your inhibitions and swum naked in primordial ooze. Mired in either a surplus or lack of possibility, you now flounder in the swells of creation.
Grabbing a pencil, you push ideas around. Logic sorts the ramble of notes into groups, those that take you underwater, those that fly, and those that slip across the surface. Navigate a sailboat. Or build a submarine. It’s exciting to think of catching a ride on a shark, do you dare? Or should you hire a plane and drop by parachute? Danger is delicious.
Opinions from others come with warnings: they add confusion. As do combining ideas. The ocean remains vast. The storm of ideas buffet you from all directions. Where there’s an idea, there are better ideas playing on the edges of your imagination. Like the tides, they present themselves in waves of attractiveness. No sooner than you dip your toe, than the appeal recedes and you scan for the next drag.
How do you judge something produced without judgment? When there’s a piece of you in every idea?
Your ideas draw you into the long view, but past the horizon, your goal, amorphous, exists as part of a Rothko painting. There’s little to show how to navigate the division, the horizon. Your compass is absent as you retreat and stare at the body of water and on into the sky above it. So much to absorb. So many possibilities.
Where’s a lifeguard? You might appreciate their help.
Adopt the persona of an impersonal third person—become the lifeguard. Detach yourself, remove yourself, survey. This is anyone else’s problem but your own. This is important: become an outsider, an onlooker, a disinterested third party. Reverse flow. Reverse view—until you are on the other side of the dividing horizon. If you are beyond safety, which idea distinguishes itself?
Turned upside down, backwards, inside out, the primordial ooze dries on the beach.
From across the span, where you swam in the crosshairs of latitude and longitude, a land bridge unfurls.