I am sitting and looking out my window at the forest and mountains in Big Bear, California feeling very inspired by the beauty of it all. How blessed I feel to be able to live in this relaxing, spiritual, inspirational and fun city and mountain heaven. And I began thinking about the word “inspiration” and why it is so important to us in our personal lives and in our country that needs it more than ever right now.
Our political climate is less than inspirational, in fact, it is downright dividing us and not “great again” – its slogan falling very short of reality. How do we get more inspiration in our lives during this depressing atmosphere created by our government? I have a friend who is a child psychologist who told me that she has never seen so many children with so much fear in her practice as she does right now. Children don’t trust the adults they see on television and in their lives being able to love, create safety for them or a future that is inspiring and secure. Instead they see adults lying, fighting, bullying, discriminating, taking away rights of people and creating “privilege” for white males who have entitlement thinking and sociopathic tendencies. So let’s look at the history of something we are lacking to see if we can get it back, for those who lost it and more of it for those who need it.
Inspiration has an unusual history in that its figurative sense appears to predate its literal one. It comes from the Latin inspiratus (the past participle of inspirare, “to breathe into, inspire”) and in English has had the meaning “the drawing of air into the lungs” since the middle of the 16th century. This breathing sense is still in common use among doctors, as is expiration (“the act or process of releasing air from the lungs”). However, before inspiration was used to refer to breath it had a distinctly theological meaning in English, referring to a divine influence upon a person, from a divine entity; this sense dates back to the early 14th century. The sense of inspiration often found today (“someone or something that inspires”) is considerably newer than either of these two senses, dating from the 19th century.
Creating your inspiration strategy
It starts by deliberately monitoring the things that inspire you the most. Write them down. Then, incorporate them into your work flow, so that you can get into an inspired state when you need to, rather than just when it randomly occurs. Build a recipe that works for you, and then use it every time you need to do some creative work or find a creative answer. Don’t wait for inspiration. Deliberately encourage it.
Then do the work
As well as inspiring ourselves to create, we also need to motivate ourselves to put what we have created into action. It’s one thing to have a great idea sketched out on paper – it’s something else to actually use that idea. We need to learn to give our ideas the chance to fly. We need to give our answers the chance to make a difference. This means we need to back them up with intelligent activity.
So look around you at the people in your lives that have done things, overcome things, and whose personalities inspire you towards something. Look at your own life and be aware of the things you have accomplished in the past that made you stronger and wiser that did not defeat you when it could have, because your own resilience motivated you to inspirational achievement. Inspiration doesn’t have to be something big; it can be something that is small – like a smile coming from you to another or vice versa. I know that music inspires me and that no one has to be around for me to feel the inspiration that listening to certain music brings me. Also, meditation inspires me. Quiet and meditative alpha state in the brain opens pathways of inspiration that I can follow up on with the added benefit of peaceful consciousness. I bring that into my life – not someone else. I choose to take the time to be inspired through nature, music, reading, friendships, role models that have shown me achievement and overcoming obstacles to reach goals.
So inspiration is the “breathing in” of life in order to motivate, fill, create and “feel” something that will help us through something, overcome something, achieve something, and be something.
So, what is inspiration? It’s something you control, which enables you to produce your best work and be your best work.
