Floodlights and Nestlings
If you were to draw the concept of an idea, would it be sharp or round? How many points would it have?
Would it be a lightbulb? Is that a bad idea? Are there bad ideas? Or, one of many answers: The collective noun for ideas is a floodlight.
A floodlight of ideas. A tumble rumble scumble of illumination. Energy that lights the way. Enlightenment.
Truism: Ideas transform our world. Humans crave the next wave of innovative thinking—for long-storage batteries, for cutting-edge therapies, biodegradable, edible packaging that ousts plastic, for the latest personal tech, and as urgent: concepts for cultivating empathy, for improving communication, for art that evolves culture.
Have you heard—ideas appear at the right time? They shed cloaks and burn brightly on cue to save lives and solve massive problems! Some ideas wrap themselves in silky, luminous promises of immediate results. Often ideas imply value. They are the first to strut their glow. Palms turn up for more of the same, quick to push away the shy, the coy, the cowardly, the ridiculous.
How many ideas have we lost to circumstance or opposition? It’s an absurd ask.
And an elusive task, hunting ideas and processing them, requiring conditioning and service. A notebook on the nightstand, a whiteboard by the shower, a recording device in the car, tools of a ghost hunter willing to believe, mocked for gullibility, and at the mercy of flippant, random, amorphous hallucinations
Yet, ideas signaling possibility differ from those abandoned. “No,” or “Bad idea!” ensures a difficult birth, if not stillbirth. Easy to discard, much harder to love a fledgling dripping with amniotic fluid. How many of us possess the skill to revive an abandoned nestling? When you repel an idea or act dismissive, its merits disappear. Summon maternal love and a willingness to seem foolish. Warm the nestling, undertake to feed it, watch it perish with genuine regret.
Dismiss your prejudice, your loathing of putrid, puny alien scales and gelatinous feathers, and you clear your way for an onslaught of connections. Attempt the impossible, to raise the fowl, you support a neural network that precludes a spinning wait cursor. You know the one—the one non-responsive to the task. Because on a planet where we await big ideas with prayer-like devotion, not all specks of light develop genesis. But in a universe of starlight, those specks are big bang stuff.
Lesson
Identify a problem. Brainstorm ten or more solutions. Work on the awfuls, past efficiency, past judgment. Then watch what happens when you adopt the idea you favor. Grapple with the first, provide resources for the second.
Divide your list in two: the bad and the good. (Now, why would you do that?) Go ahead, make this a puzzle with interchangeable pieces. Combine ideas, jumble them, sense new possibilities. No new ideas? No, there are infinite combinations and collections of thoughts.
Should your efforts seem a waste of time, look to your favorite artist. Identify a series that doesn’t work, doesn’t quite come together, seems disjointed or lacking style. Appreciate the work that followed, the work you regard. Its triumph is as compelling as the pitfalls that birthed it
.