Sometimes, the only thing you can do to make forward progress is to begin.
Sometimes, it's not possible to have a plan or a vision of what the end point looks like or understand the steps that it will take to reach your goal; sometimes, it's important enough to know that there is just a goal to reach, and you have to start now.
The second conversation we had the other day in the kitchen with Millie and Ellie was around toasties.
This followed the conversation about the lizard brain inconvenience, but the toastie conversation differed.
I was asking Ellie and Millie if they had any suggestions for blog titles because Millie was asking me for four blogs in quick succession because she has university days to go to and a weekend in the way and wants to get everything scheduled and in play (this happens a lot with me).
Millie's idea was a blog on inconvenience, but for Ellie, all we could do was toasties because she was making a toastie in a toastie maker in the kitchen at the time, and it was all she could think of.
I was prodding her for more ideas around the toastie blog concept (mostly to be selfish and to help me out with content). Then I found myself explaining to her the Edward de Bono concept of creativity from the ridiculous.
I saw de Bono himself present this (he wrote the book on lateral thinking – literally).
I saw him present how to get new ideas while thinking about ridiculous things, and I watched him prompt an audience into this process to come up with the most extraordinary idea about taxis in London.
And so, we worked our way through ideas from toasties to cheese and ham toasties to other flavours of toasties that made Ellie feel sick to the point where we were talking about the importance of creativity and being able to find new things and new ideas in the moment in whatever it was you were doing to keep your life alive and to keep it interested.
I was having the same conversation with my son the very same morning as he was having a toastie for his breakfast (the first one in a long time).
While Callum and I were making the toastie in our kitchen at that stage (basically, I was making the toastie and speaking, and Callum was doing a bit of speaking and listening), I found that we were coming up with creative ideas about lots of different things that we've never had the chance to talk about before.
And so, the point was from the discussion in the kitchen about blog titles and toasties and thinking about the ridiculous; we ended up in a situation of understanding or at least discussing that creativity and the ability to spark aspects of creativity are essential just to create conversation and discussion and co-operation and empathy and collaboration and all those other things.
We can stand and make our toasties (or perform any other seemingly mundane task) without thinking about anything else, or we can use the gaps between the moments to imagine the greatest things or solutions or ideas or schemes or any other manner of activity that means we are alive and not just walking headlong into a hell of toasties.
Blog Post Number - 3603
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