Inspired By

One of my favorite ways to spend time is to find interviews with my heroes talking about their heroes. The manner that people discuss who inspired them, how they inspired them and how they utilized that inspiration as a form of building material for their own art is both humanizing and powerful.

It’s an enjoyable exercise to trace the roots of your favorite artists, to understand their artistic palette; it effectively allows you to be them, if only for a brief moment in time. What makes each of us unique, is that we are a confluence of everything that has ever moved us. Not only are we unique in that confluence but we are unique in what we take from each thing that has moved us.

Pardon the gravitas but in a very tangible way, inspiration is the magic that connects all of humanity through the entirety of time.

I once read, or entirely fabricated since I can’t for the life of me find it again, a quote, “Music is a conversation through time.” that struck me. It was the most concise way to explain how I have always felt about understanding the giants that we all stand on. It also served as a tacit reminder that in order to create, you must be inspired.

The beauty of inspiration is that it transcends nearly every medium. For every person who has seen Michael Jordan and bought a basketball, there is another person who has seen a Spielberg film and decided to make movies and another yet who has been moved by the power of medicine to become a Doctor. Inspiration touches us all, in different capacities, to do more than we thought possible.

However, inspiration is fickle.

It is fleeting.

It is unpredictable.

And yet it is those exact traits that foster the unrelenting power of being unmitigatedly inspired.

You can never plan to be inspired, in any meaningful capacity. It can come from the color of the leaves, the sounds of a record, the sights of the world. For all the inspiration gives us, it asks of us only a single demand:

Make yourself available to it.

All too often, especially as we grow through adulthood, we find ourselves with much less wonder, much less awe of the world we inhabit. There is no reason for this, no natural law that says we must relinquish our capacity to be captivated. It is perhaps then unsurprising that we find it tedious to be creative or unmotivated to contribute in a meaningful way. If you have reached the conclusion, subconsciously, that there is little-to-no things to be moved by, what is the underlying purpose of contributing to the world at-large; for whatever you bestow upon it will surely not have the capacity to move others.

Instead I contend, you must open yourself up to inspiration and receive it. It is our collective moral obligation to receive from those who walked before us and our collective moral obligation utilize it in the form of creation or action.

How selfish it would be to take from the ether that we call the universe and to not give back in the hopes that another person can receive the elation of being inspired.

A life bereft of inspiration is, for all purposes, no life at all.