Just an Idea
The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else. ~ Philip Pullman
“It has all been done before.” This comment is a killer. You get an idea, and it triggers the it’s-been-done-before-argument in your head. A second thought follows on cue, ‘… why should I even bother?!’
Before it had a chance to become anything, your young and fragile idea got rejected and thrown on the scrap heap of unborn creative human potential.
The ‘sensible’ reason: not new, clever, trendy, unique, good, big, or special enough. That’s how original brand-new human ideas get stamped out with the label OUTDATED.
You and I know that all great inventions of mankind started with ‘just an idea’. We admire the great inventors and artists. Why are we so suspicious of our own ideas? … contemptuous even??!!
Too dull, too silly, too small, too far away, too big-headed, too ……………? Take your pick, or fill in the blank.
Any idea is just an idea — that’s what it’s designed to be. It comes via inspiration and it is meant to inspire creative activity.
An idea is like a seed-crystal. It needs to be cultivated, so that it can mature. One single idea may not come to very much, but second thoughts, and committed creative activity produce further ideas. That’s how all great works of art are created.
Ideas come to the artist while she is painting. The writer’s mind is flooded with ideas in the process of writing. Ideas nurtured by creative activity breed more ideas. No great invention or masterpiece is the result of just one idea, but a whole symphony of delicate sparkling ideas, given the chance to crystallise into existence.
If we judge our ideas by their humble appearance — if I refuse to give them welcoming and kind thoughts, and can’t be bothered to nurture them through generous creative activity — that’s like taking precious seeds of a rare plant and throwing them away because they don’t look like the fully grown specimen!
Fortunately the vegetable kingdom doesn’t have the ‘sensibility’ of the human mind. All plant seeds would be assigned to the scrapheap of outdated creative plant potential — for lack of uniqueness, originality, dubious size, and suspicious quality — if Mother Nature thought with human logic: “It’s all been done before,… why should I even bother?!”
