Inspiration and the Strange World of Contradictions That Is... LIFE!

One of the fascinating things about this thing we call life is the fact that it is riddled with contradictions in paradoxes.

For example, I just had to step away from my desk and go to some other part of the house, away from the space with my computer and away from the space where I normally write... all in order to write a post!

I was sitting at my desk and basically "drawing a blank," and realized that I very much needed a change of scenery in order to make any progress whatsoever.

That seems to happen quite a lot in my life. Essentially I describe it as "choosing to NOT do what I need to do in order to DO what I need to do."

Clearly, that's a paradox!

I had lots of good intentions to get many things done today. It was a nice sunny day, so instead of doing the things I needed to do I went outside and did a good bit of yard work. In truth, that was actually something that needed doing because it is seriously autumn and I needed to rake leaves and rake up the droppings from our cedar trees because they were piling up rather severely in our driveway!

All in all, it was actually quite effective, because when I came back in I immediately started penciling down some notes of things to write about, and I was able to get straight into working on some of my eBay photography without feeling aimlessly and endlessly distracted.

This, is the life of somebody who lives with ADHD.

It strikes me that there's a slight irony in the fact that 50 or 100 years ago I would simply have been called "an absent minded professor." Now it is 2023 and I have a "mental condition," if not exactly a mental illness.

But to get back to writing for a moment — or rather, to my lack of inspiration in figuring out something to write about — I ended up sitting at my kitchen counter with my phone creating the beginnings of this post. That in itself is a bit of a paradox, because I actually hate typing on my phone... but somehow I just needed that "change of scenery" in order to get my brain to start working.

I've previously written here about what I call "Pancake Creativity." It's basically the process of going off and doing something completely unrelated to writing in order to loosen up the flow of ideas to write about.

Ironically, this non-parallel way of accessing my creativity was one of the main reasons why I failed rather miserably at Corporate America. I was never very good at just taking an assignment and doing it. I always had to go away and "think about it," and juggle mental balls inside my head, and perhaps do something utterly unrelated before I could actually tackle the problem at hand.

And so, now that I have roughed out this post on my phone — and thereby taking four times longer than I should because I can't type worth a damn on a smartphone — I can return to my main computer and finish my post!

Isn't that both silly, and ironic?

At moments like this, I find myself being very grateful that this is my personal blog, and that I'm not working for something like a magazine where I would have to write exactly a thousand words on the shape of whiskey bottles or the appropriate color yellow to use in a child's room. Life is good!

Anyway, thanks for putting up with my rather random and arbitrary musings! I do appreciate your visiting my blog, and I hope you continue to have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Do you have a particular creative process? Do you ever find that your best ideas come when you are NOT directly trying? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

**(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2023.11.07 23:56 PST
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