Inspiration is a funny thing. Where does it come from and where does it go?
It is there all the time. It’s just that we cannot always access it. It comes and it goes as we connect to it in uplifting, exciting surges of energy, words, sounds and feelings. Once you have felt the surge you find it hard to live without it and thirst for more. You spend every moment trying to recapture that illusive moment when you last saw it. Writing, composing or painting without it, is dry, dull and plain hard work. It sucks! You are left with the resultant task of arduously filling time or cramming the waste bin.
Throughout my life I have had many loving bouts of this inspiration directed at various projects, as diverse as running a mobile catering van to building a cutting edge management training centre for blue chip firms.
Inspiration, as I knew it, was at its peak in the early nineties when I had a furniture business. It was by the River Ouse in York, England. Every morning I would walk into the workshop and inspiration would await at the work bench, nearly every day. It was as if a channel would open above my head and a surging river of the stuff would flow in, and then out again through my feet and arms. This was perhaps one of the most constant sources of inspiration I ever had. It wasn’t that making furniture for me was particularly exciting, nor was the business very dynamic. The inspiration just flowed, and I would later learn that it was this which made the business so much fun, not what I made.
This business, I had begun earlier in the year, having never made any furniture ever before. I had had no experience in wood or business, no tools nor money and no house or income. I rather foolishly took on the rent of a lovely workshop, blinded by my inner trust. It was not until some 2 years
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later when the source of inspiration and trust suddenly gave up on me, I realized what a mug I must have been to follow my inner whim so blindly. .
It was just after winning the Young Business of the year award that the source of inspiration dried up, and it was on this note we made a timely exit We had decided that the prize money would be best spent surfing in Mexico for the winter rather than expanding the successful business. This as you can guess also meant the end of that particular enterprise which had served me very well.
It would be another year later before inspiration finally empowered me again, to begin yet another business, with yet again a frighteningly familiar lack of experience, cash and knowledge. This pattern seems to have repeated itself throughout my life.
Looking back on past events I began to draw similarities from the inspiring patterns that I had been following. It was as if I was chasing the inspiration not the business. The business was always subservient to the inspiration and inspiration led the way not business common sense.
In my sensible moments I looked on this way of doing business as a pretty crazy idea. All I wanted to do was to make a success of life, earn shed loads of money and retire to the Caribbean. It annoyed me that so many times I had been so reckless, and cast off really great businesses once I had made a success of them. I was then left to start blind again, hopelessly at the bottom of the pile, beginning a new scheme, I knew nothing about. I was determined not to let this happen again, but I seemed powerless to prevent it. This inspiration was a powerful driving force and once it left me I simply could not carry on even if a business was obviously successful.
It is here that I am going to diverge the story onto another track. This inspiration I had begun to parallel with another feeling. In between my ventures into business I had travelled extensively around the globe, usually on a shoe string budget hopping from hovel to hovel. The freedom I felt while travelling was wonderful and was very similar to the inspiration I unwittingly chased in my business ventures. While one side of me chased money, or so I thought , the other side chased the inspiration. The only problem with traveling is that just like inspiration, it doesn’t last. Eventually you reach a point where lying placidly on a tropical beach, plied with cheap Asian cuisine, starts to become pointless. The time this takes seems to vary from months to years.
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As I lie weakened by the easy life, the next idea slowly shuffles into my mind until it overtakes my common sense and I am forced to leave the comfort and ease of life in Asia and India, to throw myself yet again into the unwelcoming jaws of the harsh business world, again driven by fateful inspiration.
Later in life is where I eventually started to draw these parts of my life together. I had acquired the depth of meaning which allowed me to start making sense of these patterns I so haplessly followed. The surprise was, this understanding, far from allowing me to gain more control over my life, and seek the life I thought I wanted, it undermined any lasting control I thought I had, and swept the rug away from under my feet. Just how could that happen? I had sought to understand this part of my life, but the trail had only taken me yet further away from asserting any sort of control or gaining anymore understanding of my life. How could this be? Was it Murphy’s law dominating events or was I just unlucky?