Good ideas are rare?

The myth that good ideas are rare is just that!

If you watch any 6 year old child they will invent dozens of things in an hour. 

We are built for creativity. The problem is the conventions of adult life demand conformity and we sacrifice our creative instincts in favour of social status.

Unlike a child, adults are supremely and instantly judgmental, killing ideas before they’ve had even a moment to prove their worth. It’s easy to rediscover creativity, which is why brainstorming rarely helps much. We’re already creative. 

The challenge is ideas don’t come with the courage to invest in them. Good ideas are everywhere: what’s uncommon is people with the conviction to put their reputation behind ideas.

Back in the high life

Wolterdingen after a year's break from competition running, back on the podium again.
Feels good too!
  

Unicorn or horse?

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until – “My God,” says the second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.”

At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are, the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… 

“Look, look” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

-Tom Stoppard.

If I only had words

After nearly sixty years with words, a competence has developed in providing appropriate sentences, and even paragraphs for birthdays, anniversaries and other occasions. Words for public occasions can be provided in an adequate, if not expert manner.

The most difficult words are those needed for personal moments. Walking to work this morning I remembered a heated conversation with Silke in January and then later on the car radio they played an old Madness song, “My girl’s mad at me:”

My girl’s mad at me

Been on the telephone for an hour

We hardly said a word

I tried and tried but I could not be heard

Why can’t I explain?

Why do I feel this pain?

‘Cause everything I say

She doesn’t understand

She doesn’t realise

She takes it all the wrong way.

From 1980. The passage of nearly four decades has not lessened the sense of being inarticulate in important moments, the sense of not having words that properly express the feelings inside. Sometimes, the words serve only to cause pain. Sometimes, the wrong words are used in the wrong way with the wrong results. Sometimes the words just won’t do.

There is a sense of knowing that this is not how it should be; knowing that it could be done better, knowing that it should be done better. Sorry Silke.

Days

Philip Larkin was afraid of death.  However this did not prevent him from creating poems that are full of Beauty and Truth, and which celebrate the wonder and joy of being alive -- in their own Larkinesque way, of course.  Do not believe those who caricature Larkin as a dour, cranky misanthrope.  Anybody who holds this view has not taken the time to actually read Larkin's poems.

            Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
-Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber & Faber 1964).

Larkin being Larkin, the second verse is required.  But consider the first verse. Some may say that the line "They are to be happy in" is intended to be morbid or ironic.  It is not.  Others may say that the entire poem is nothing more than a cliché.  In fact, it is a simple statement of truth.

The modern urge to over-complicate life puzzles me.  "Days are where we live." Look around.  Everything is right there in front of you.