The other day, I had four different ideas for this blog while walking home from the bakery. Four! That felt like some kind of record. I was almost sad that I had already written my post for the day.
I thought about jotting the ideas down once I got home. Sometimes, I do. If a thought feels interesting but elusive, I might open a new draft right then and there. This time, I chose not to.
Important ideas always come back. Most of the rest are either average or just shiny distractions. Still, letting go of these ideas did make me feel anxious for a second. Why? Because when you write a daily blog, you need a lot of average ideas regardless. You need any idea on any given day. And in that sense, throwing away four of them in one fell swoop feels like a waste.
But this is the same as trying to eat all your meals for a week in one sitting, isn’t it? It doesn’t work—because nourishment must happen in increments. The only way to maintain a daily habit is to have faith in your ability to perform that habit every day. With writing, you must trust in the idea river.
The idea river keeps flowing even when you don’t. It’s always on, always pattering along. During my bakery trip, the river spat out four fish and threw them right at my feet. That’s amazing. It also happens once every blue moon. And since I had already taken a fish for the day, I had to chuck them all back in.
The next morning, all of my ideas were gone. I started again from scratch. This time, I wished for a fish but none were handed to me on a silver plate. So I had to reach in and grab what I could. I don’t remember what I wrote about, but, as always, I did manage to pull something from the river.
You’ll never run out of ideas. The main reason we trip ourselves up is that we’d like to control when we have good ideas. “I need a stroke of genius, and I need it now!” we tell ourselves. But Edison did not know on which attempt he’d invent the lightbulb, and neither can we command our brains to deliver our best work right when it’s most convenient.
Trust in the idea river. Fetch one fish every day, and enjoy the big game when it lands in your lap. The rest is just waiting for the lightning—and you might as well walk to the bakery in that time.
