Idea

My brain is oft of late not the cooperative generator I desire.  My on-demand idea maker muddles through many a morning with not much to offer me aside from the rote motion of making peanut and butter and jelly sandwiches and tucking them into their expected spaces in lunch box containers, driving and dropping and doing normal stuff that is all good, but not much to write about.  I’m feeling uncreative about what to wear, what to prepare for meals, what to read next, what to plan for family adventure.  I find I am not actually musing a thing come sunrise many a Monday morn.  Today, I sit at my computer with coffee in hand to write and no idea arises.  No word worth a whit winds its way worthily out into animation.  Maybe I’m looking for too grand an idea to arise.  Seems my mind is a mush, not discontent but simply without an idea.

Dictionary.com offers entries to define the noun idea from the Collins World English Dictionary.
1.  any content of the mind, especially the conscious mind
2.  the thought of something
3.  a mental representation of something
4.  the characterization of something in general terms; concept
5.  an individual’s conception of something
6.  the belief that something is the case
7.  a scheme, intention, plan, etc.
8.  a vague notion of indication
9.  significance or purpose

A friend pointed out recently that I have been saying since January that I am abundantly busy with every daily moment scheduled, but I’m bored.  Every numbered calendar square has plenty penned upon it indeed, but I am admittedly uninterested in my general thoughts of late - bored with their basic banality, their continuation of commonness, their series of same-old same-old. I know this is part of a writer’s life, part of mid-life perhaps in general is this feeling of having been doing much the same things day after day.  As a kid who began early in life receiving “talks too much” remarks on report cards I just haven’t dealt often with having nothing to say. 

I feel restless because I love the flow of inventive energy that comes with fashioning poetry or prose that flows and finds a way to say what I am thinking.  But indeed, the mental representation of something must come first for me to find the words to work onto it like papier-mâché on a shape – eventually the strips of gluey sticky stuff dry and harden and become the object itself around the unseen, untouchable  inside that once held itself up to provide a palate for construction.  Any shape, any sound, any syllable sent into the world to communicate content of the conscious mind starts as an idea.

I love words.  I like to play with them.  They are my crayons, clay and paints.  I keep plenty in my personal pockets.  I want to use them to make something.  I simply have no significance or purpose in mind at the moment.