Life is preaching to us all the time.

But on a habitual level, we have to be intent on making the word become flesh.

As we scour and learn and read and listen and annotate from a wide range of websites, blogs, pictures, online publications, interviews, studies, books, articles, songs, street art, store signs, podcasts, eavesdroppings, conversations and other sources of inspiration, our sole purpose is finding ways to make the word become flesh.

Because all we need is one idea, one thought, one image, one metaphor, one sentence, one poetic turn of a phrase, which we feel deep in their bones and can’t wait to share with the world, and we’ll make a meal out of it.

Carlin used to write comedy this way.

He’d begin with a single note.

But over time, his notes would take on a life of their own. They’d start to find each other and become a family of ideas. And before he knew it, George would be sitting on sixty minutes of new material for his next standup special, all of which originated from that first note, that crucial moment of creative conception, that little piece of kindling that got the fire going.

And the best part about the process was, once the bonfire was blazing, nobody even remembered the piece of toilet paper that started it.

This creative habit, this daily process of making the word become flesh, can actually become a form of muscle memory. In the same way that a yogi’s hips snap into the downward dog position, the motor task of documenting meaningful things you notice can eventually become something you perform without conscious effort.

It just takes practice.

Creativity, after all, is an action verb.