Catching Lightening (The Urgency of Inspiration)
This is for the ones who feel the rush of an idea- the ones who know that inspiration does not wait. Who understand that creativity isn’t something to be scheduled, that ideas are fleeting, weightless things, and if you don’t reach out and grab them, they’re gone.
I believe, like Elizabeth Gilbert (“Big Magic”), that ideas are living things. That they don’t belong to us- they visit us. They hover in the air, waiting for someone willing to catch them, to pull them down, to give them form. I’ve felt it - the exact moment when an idea enters, as if it came from somewhere else entirely. A phrase, an image, a spark that I wasn’t even looking for. It doesn’t come with warning. It arrives, fully formed, weightless, ready. And if I don’t act, it drifts away.
I’ve learned this the hard way. I have lost ideas. I have trusted myself to remember, to hold onto a phrase until I could write it down properly. And by the time I reached for it? It was gone. Completely. The worst kind of forgetting- not just losing a word, but losing the feeling it carried.
So now, I don’t wait. I stop what I’m doing. I write it down. I don’t care if it’s inconvenient- if I’m in the shower, if I’m half asleep, if I’m mid-conversation. The people who know me understand- I will stop to catch an idea, because if I don’t, it’s never coming back.
There are ideas I still mourn… the ones I almost had, the ones I can feel the outline of but can’t quite grasp. I wonder if they found someone else, if they landed in another mind, if they live now in someone else’s art.
That’s the thing about inspiration- it’s not loyal. It belongs to whoever claims it first. If you ignore it, if you hesitate, it will move on. Because ideas don’t need you. You need them.
I try to keep myself open. I try to create space for ideas to arrive. I listen to music that shakes something loose in me. I keep notebooks everywhere. I let myself daydream. I let myself play. Because the more you welcome ideas, the more they trust you. The more often you catch them, the more often they come back. Creativity is a relationship, and if you honour it, it will honour you.
So if an idea finds you today- stop what you’re doing. Write it down. Grab it before it disappears. Because inspiration doesn’t wait, and the ones who capture it are the ones who create something out of nothing!
Listen to the audio version of this post below for those who connect with words not just by reading, but by feeling them through sound:
