Guest Entry: Inspiration is Everywhere

If I were in your shoes and got hit with an happy-sounding phrase like INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE, I’d men­tally spring into one of three mind­sets: 1. Skepticism 2. “Amen, Brother!” or 3. Apathy. I’d also make a few assump­tions: that the inten­tion behind such a procla­ma­tion was to be inspi­ra­tional in itself. Furthermore, the meta-assumption is that we’re all look­ing for it, or need it real bad.

Let’s con­sider the mind­sets I was just talk­ing about:

For skep­tics: A phrase like “inspi­ra­tion is every­where” doesn’t work on you because you haven’t felt inspired lately, or you know you’re inspired only by very spe­cific things. You may feel, intu­itively, that if every­thing is inspir­ing, that’s equiv­a­lent to say­ing noth­ing is. Which isn’t very inspiring…a HA! On the other hand, if you’re not feel­ing it, there may be some root causes. For exam­ple: (1) you’re too tired, (2) you’re too stuck in a rut, or pos­si­ble (3) you are already sure of the way your life is going. In any case, you can’t allow your­self to be both­ered by crazy new-age artsy-fartsy huggy-kissy “make love, not war” sen­ti­men­tal­ity. There’s work to be done! Inspiration is a lux­ury for the lazy and the lost. That’s a per­fectly fine phi­los­o­phy of life. People who are so sure can be highly pro­duc­tive, and so I applaud you. Still, it doesn’t exactly help me: I’m still lost!

For the mem­bers of the choir: “Inspiration is every­where” is the phrase by which you live your life, so you’re already singing its praises with me. As my generation’s spir­i­tual leader said best: Life cre­ates it, makes it grow. Its energy sur­rounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude mat­ter. You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you…me…the tree…the rock…everywhere! Yes, even between this land and that ship! You’ve arrived, some­how, in a spe­cial place where you’ve dis­cov­ered what makes you happy. Or…you’re deluded and crazy, and are livin’ it up. Either way, you’re hav­ing a good time, and I’m envious.

For the apa­thetic: I’m guess­ing you arrived here through sheer acci­dent, per­haps while googling for Yoda quotes. It was irre­spon­si­ble for me to quote him so broadly (sorry), but I may have done you a big favor by pulling you here. Browse around, why don’t you? And thank you for read­ing this far.

I tend to think that when it comes to inspi­ra­tion, you either feel it, or you don’t. And, we can’t have a good con­ver­sa­tion about inspi­ra­tion being E V E R Y W H E R E unless we have an under­stand­ing of the mean­ing of the phrase. For me, that means trans­mut­ing “the sim­ple why” — that we’re all look­ing for inspi­ra­tion — into the lan­guage of desire: we want to be in motion, doing the things that we like doing, even if we have no idea what the heck they are. Inspiration is about the hope that joy may fol­low if we act on our instincts.

For me, true inspi­ra­tion is com­prised of two parts: a feel­ing and a trig­ger to action. This lat­ter point is crit­i­cal: it’s one thing to feel inspired, but quite another thing to actu­ally do some­thing about it. As a self-proclaimed “pro­duc­tiv­ity enthu­si­ast”, it’s impor­tant for me to see some kind of result from my inspi­ra­tion, hope­fully lead­ing to a state of last­ing good­ness. Otherwise, inspi­ra­tion is just another form of escape. Taken in mod­er­a­tion, escapist inspi­ra­tion feels good, but if you have found your true inspi­ra­tion and don’t act, it can turn to poi­son and rot you from the inside out. That empty, hol­low feel­ing will stay with you till the end of your days, until you can fill it with some­thing good.

The sec­ond part of inspi­ra­tion — the trig­ger — is the impulse that causes you to act. When you’re truly inspired by some­thing awe­some, it’s hard to know where to start because it’s so far from where you are right now. In the begin­ning, you can really just start any­where. Here’s an exer­cise that helps you see con­nec­tions is a way to help you map out your pos­si­ble start­ing points:

1. Grab the first thing that you see on your desk, the weirder the better.
2. Ask your­self where it’s from and why it exists.
3. Repeat ad nau­seum until you find some­thing that per­son­ally relates to you in an impor­tant way.

The idea is to get your­self think­ing about how things and peo­ple con­nect in ways you’re not used to. A lot of us (me included) wan­der around not see­ing where we are or what we’re doing , because we’re pre-occupied with work and things we are rush­ing to do. You know, “not stop­ping to smell the roses”. If you’re not a rose-smeller by nature, the ratio­nal approach of ask­ing why until you get back to first prin­ci­ples that can be reduced no fur­ther works pretty well. In my expe­ri­ence, a lot of the “first prin­ci­ples” can be explained using some­thing like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; we have fun­da­men­tal human needs — sus­te­nance, safety, social con­nec­tion, and self-esteem — that need sat­is­fy­ing. This is what ulti­mately dri­ves desire, which cre­ates mar­kets to ful­fill those desires, by peo­ple all act­ing in their own inter­ests — even char­i­ta­ble ones. The path to find­ing inspi­ra­tion is often oblique; by com­ing at some­thing side­ways, or pur­pose­fully not look­ing for some­thing, you can often find some­thing novel and unex­pected. The only caveat is that you must be aware as you’re doing this; the exer­cise I sug­gested will help you develop some of that awareness.

It just occurred to me that there’s another another group of peo­ple other than skep­tics and enthu­si­asts: lapsed inspi­ra­tionistas who’ve lost the faith. They are the peo­ple who love being inspired, but haven’t felt it in a while. There’s some­thing miss­ing, and I think it’s the feel­ing of con­nec­tion with some­thing or any­thing. Again, we come back to ful­fill­ment: you need to con­nect with your­self, and with other people.

There are also a cou­ple of spe­cial sit­u­a­tions that pre­vent you from find­ing inspiration:

• You either are not in a place where you can feel inspired, or you are blocked in your efforts to bring the inspi­ra­tion to some kind of fruition. The key is to first have faith that you can change your sit­u­a­tion, and then do what you need to do to make it hap­pen. If you’ve tried this sev­eral times already, or have seen peo­ple try and fail dis­mally, this may be why you’re a skep­tic. If you are utterly happy with being skep­ti­cal about such things, I’m not going to tell you to change. However, if you aren’t par­tic­u­larly happy about things, your skep­ti­cism is just a way of cop­ing with your own inac­tion. It is poten­tially toxic.

• It is pos­si­ble that you are mis­tak­ing “inspi­ra­tion” with “not being bored”. If you’re bored all the time, the best thing I’ve found to do is to get out of the old rou­tine and try some­thing — any­thing! — new. You will be exposed to other peo­ple are doing dif­fer­ent things, and that’s a short­cut to find­ing new expe­ri­ences. It’s amaz­ing just how ripe with infor­ma­tion peo­ple are, if you can find some way of ask­ing about them. One thing I’ve taken to doing is ask­ing what some peo­ple have been doing for fun lately, by way of look­ing for some­thing new to try. People are often quite will­ing to tell you (hint: ask peo­ple who are in a good mood, not neu­tral or angry, unless you like being scowled at :-)

If you’ve resolved all the caveats I’ve described to this point, I sus­pect you may have found what really mat­ters to you, and you’re ready to see inspi­ra­tion frickin’ every­where. My the­ory, which I am still test­ing, is this:

To really be able to see inspi­ra­tion every­where, you will need to learn to see the world through your own per­sonal lens, one that frames every­thing in terms of what’s impor­tant to you.

It sounds self­ish — and it is! In a good way! GOOD FOR YOU! There is no escap­ing your­self, so you might as well embrace it. Even things that don’t fit in your “pic­ture of the world” can be seen as exam­ples of what NOT to be doing…that saves you time! It’s fun, and even poten­tially prof­itable, once you can get in align­ment with a few things that really get you inspired, con­stantly and con­tin­u­ously. Always in motion is the future, and that’s how we can be as well. The more we fol­low this, the greater the like­li­hood that we’ll find what we’re all look­ing for: Inspiration, in every­thing we do.

—Dave Seah