Incubating Ideas

 On the way home tonight to Mandarin class, I started to think about how much brainstorming and writing I will need to do to start nurturing a suitable topic for my thesis. It's going to be a bit of a long journey, and I suppose one of the joys of this process lies in not really knowing where it will ultimately take me. But the good thing about it is that, just as a bird often uses even the most random elements at its disposal to "create" a nest, so even the most disparate elements could end up forming this future totality. At the same time, I want to make sure that what I come up with is really coming from my own heart.

I sense that this is part of why doctoral work is in itself a spiritual process of forming connections and accessing the soul. It doesn't need to be imitative of similar processes: it can certainly borrow from things around it, but the process of inner learning (learning about one's deepest aspirations) is going to be different to everyone. To know this in itself lifts me of the burden of having to somehow read or absorb everything. Sometimes the most direct topic will naturally solidify over time, and one gradually builds and deepens her or his connections to the preferred topic.

Ideas need to sit for a while before they can grow and hatch, but analogously, one needs to nurture those ideas with warmth, spirit, consistency, and care. Many people confuse the creative process with a kind of stagnation. They might have had episodes in their lives when creative ideas just seemed to strike them, unprecedented, out of the blue, with no prior context to know just how they arose. But what isn't accounted for in these cases is how much care is put into mystery. That is, one has to have faith that mystery has a kind of productivity, a little bit like the faith of going up a misty mountain and not really knowing when or how one will reach the highest point. And most of all, I believe that a certain amount of dedicated "plodding" is essential for one's finest, most heartfelt ideas to emerge. Even if a thousand such thoughts and inspirations don't amount to the final result, they play their part in eliminating possibilities, which is also an important (and often ignored) aspect of creation. Yes, even one's "rejected" ideas are generative, because they represent learning efforts and new insights as much as the "final" product does.