Hi interneters! I hope your summers have been going well.
My body clock has been a little wonky lately; I shifted from 10 am mornings to 6 am mornings this week for four days of robotics camp, so I found myself awake at 5:51 am today with nowhere to go.
Pretty close.
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I ended up wandering around the neighborhood trying to watch the sunrise. It was kind of anticlimactic; the sun seems to take way longer to get up than it does to go down at night. Which is not at all different from my own sleep schedule, I now realize. Also there were a lot of trees in the way. (How do people mired in the suburbs properly enjoy a sunrise like is that even possible?) But I did bring along a notebook, and that morning calmness that feels the way the blue of a post-dawn sky looks was really really nice.
My morning escapade got me thinking about inspiration in the first place. With writing, there is a lot of times a tendency (not quite a pressure) to seek and find inspiration, whether that means nature hikes, people-watching, or seeking suburban sunrises. It got me thinking about a Chuck Close quote I saw online:
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.” ― Chuck Close
The idea that inspiration is unnecessary is actually kind of liberating. Like we already have the capacity to create within ourselves, you know? Maybe that's the case. Maybe our seeking inspiration is just a way to tap into those creative recesses filled with paintings and poetry and ideas and to nurture, if not release, the silent genius within each of us.
I definitely like that idea.
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