Great Ideas are Born of the Heart

Curiosity, imagination, and inspiration are as essential to the ideas that promote progress as reading, writing, and arithmetic. They are the heart that makes the body function. As the framework for ideas, they are integral to the collective health of individuals, communities, and nations. Without them, we are robots obsessed with input and output, receiving facts and producing products.

Thankfully, creation cannot be mass-produced the way construction can. As Charles Dickens is credited with writing, “the whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” Only Charles Dickens could have written Dickens’s novels. Other writers can borrow his rhythm or his sentiment, but they cannot become him; individuals cannot be replicated, only emulated.

Since ideas begin with the heart, let us embrace the truth: inspiration is everywhere. It waits in a constellation of freckles, in a single raindrop tracing the grain of a weathered fence, and in the quiet fact that birds begin to sing in the dark, long before they can see the light that will illuminate their day.

But we cannot see any of it if we are perpetually glued to a screen as our great ideas atrophy before they reach the surface. Therefore, boredom is not a condition to be medicated with entertainment, but an invitation to open our hearts to curiosity, imagination, and inspiration—to each other.