Ideas are "events"

On the morning of my 24^th birthday, during my first year as a newspaper journalist, I woke up with a vision for a series of articles called Crumbling Foundations that would explore the seismic changes in areas such as education, freedom, politics, religion, and other topics I can no longer remember because, well, there’s the tragedy of time, aging, and too many subsequent memories shoving earlier memories through an unseen exit pipe protruding from the back of my skull like some kind of cerebral dyer vent.

The series won a regional newspaper award even though I really had no idea what I was talking about when I was interviewing people and composing the articles. I’m grateful that I no longer have copies of those pieces or even the tiny trophy someone mailed me (because I didn’t know about the awards ceremony until after the fact), because I would cringe.

A lot.

I’m already quite aware of my lingering naivete and have no need to revisit a season when it was centerstage and everyone else knew it except for me and, perhaps, my mother because I learned naivete from her as much as I learned positive thinking from my father.

In late 2009 I was taking one of my morning solitary walks in my former neighborhood along a path that snakes through some woods. Fall was close to fully yielding to winter and most of the trees had shed their multi-colored leaves.

At the time I was almost done with the initial draft of what would become my first completed novel as an adult and was struggling to come up with a title. And there it was, dropping into my brain like a golden leaf floating to the ground: Narcissus Blinked.

At the time these were simply ideas, invisible to anyone outside of my brain until I spoke about them and implemented them. Nothing changed externally as the ideas manifested, and yet there’s no debating that I was different.

Think back on some of the most important choices you’ve made. Before they debuted to the outside world as actions, they were meaningful to you. Deciding to break up with a partner or quit a job. Contemplating going back to graduate school. Coming up with the concept of your next article, perhaps thinking of the title before writing the first word of the body. (That’s what happened with this article.)

Hence, my longstanding contention that just like graduating from college, meeting your future spouse, and spraining your ankle are events, so are ideas. Even if the culture, family, or workplace where you’re immersed tells you otherwise or simply blows you off, insisting that nothing is valuable and worth pointing to until it flows from your head into concrete action steps with results that can be quantified, your ideas matter.

There’s a cool exercise used during Human-Centered Design Thinking workshops called the “brain dump.” It’s likely familiar to almost all of you, even if you’re not acquainted with Design Thinking itself.

The context is coming up with potential solutions to previously-identified pain points. The instructions are simple: Grab a pen and a fresh pad of sticky notes and jot down every single solution that comes to mind. Don’t linger for more than a few seconds on any one of them. Don’t choose to not write something down because you think it probably won’t work or might be ridiculed.

Before you know it, you might have 50, 75, or even 100 new ideas. Only then do you have permission to cull, to chip away at the marble until there’s just three or four little statues.

This type of exercise does something beautiful and unexpected for introverts, something that doesn’t usually happen during work meetings or cocktail party conversations. It creates a forum for them to fully express what’s been marinating inside. And that’s energizing.

(I’m not minimizing the joy this can produce for extraverts as well, by the way, but your ideas tend to get more attention and discussion and tactics in daily life because, well, you tend to verbalize them as they’re forming. Keep doing that; just don’t assume the “quiet people” in the room don’t have quality ideas of their own.)

Regardless of setting or context, your ideas are immeasurable as soon catch a neuron like they’re sittin’ on top of the world. How dare anyone say otherwise? How dare they minimize the impact of your epiphanies, insights, and visions?

Don’t they realize that you can’t “undo” a powerful idea even if you wanted to, that you’ve virtually no choice but to inch it forward, teasing out its layers and nuances, because the cost of not doing so, of letting its color fade like a sidewalk-squatting leaf that’s been rained on and trampled on for months, once beautiful but now shriveled with irrelevancy, isn’t literal death but most certainly a loss of some kind?

And that changes you as well. Not for the better.

You won’t die wishing you were less naïve when you were 24 but, if still lucid, you might wax nostalgic for what might have been if you’d had the courage or discipline to bring an idea to fruition.

The books you never wrote. The conversations you never had. The trips you never took.

They all started as ideas and died as ideas and if, during your final days or hours you tried to communicate that importance to others, they would likely smile or pat your arm and tell you, “It’s ok, don’t worry about that,” and if you could read their facial expressions you’ve suspect they probably thought you “didn’t know what you were saying.” They’d pat your arm, ask if you wanted another sip of water, check the position of the pillows behind your head and neck to ensure you were comfortable.

Don’t fucking pat someone’s arm, even innocently, less you dismiss the value of their ideas just because you don’t immediately “get it.”

And if you’re the recipient of said patting, a victim unprotected by any laws or policies, you don’t necessarily need to tell the person to fuck off…but if you tell your inner monologues to fuck off you’ll be fucked because they most certainly will fuck the hell off because why should they do otherwise?

Don’t pat your own arm. I don’t care what your hands do unless they’re harming you or someone else. I don’t want you to self-pat. Pick your nose, masturbate, peel a scab, whatever, but don’t patronize your own brilliant mind. Don’t cringe at any gift it offers during any moment.

What ideas are you inadvertently telling to fuck off right now? What ideas are you not writing down, not verbalizing, too quickly judging their merits and never giving them a chance to breathe and expand their lungs?

I’m so happy as I type the final sentences of this article and get ready to post it here on Substack. I’m thrilled that I brought three words, ideas are events, into the world after quietly holding them for close to a decade.

The endorphin rush of finishing an article, a poem, a painting, any kind of creative work. It’s better than cake, pizza, or a margarita.

It’s an ethereal orgasm that lingers with a yes-yes-yes that echoes, that’s remembered far longer than any kind of physical release.