Tuesday's Mental Musing

There is a fine line between being inspired and mimicking. The two often blend but most of the time they are apparently different. And most of the time we don't know the difference between taking and claiming someone else's creative intent and/or being inspired by someone else's creative expression until we are in the middle of the act of mimicking it. It is only when we come to the place where our creativity takes over and we allow ourselves to proceed to adjust what we are doing so that it reflects our own abilities and vision that we free our inspiration and travel our own creative road.

Some of us get there, some of us don't. Some of us believe because ideas are free that it is ok to access those shared with us in trust. Rather than encourage those who initiate the idea to explore it on their own we become enamored with their concept and begin our own research into resolving their creative question. And it is because of the belief that ideas, thoughts, emotions are free and often universal that we can justify the high jacking of another's work. And though it is true that our hands may differ when it comes to materializing the solution to another's creative concept when we can only mimic rather than be inspired to find the place in us that we "own" we know that the we have produced work that truly doesn't belong to us and in the process stolen the joy of exploration from our "friend".

Our actions can and often do alienate us from the one who originally brought their idea(s) to our attention. And some of us are OK with this because we call those we "borrow" from our muses and by doing so justify our desire to explore rather than encourage by being "inspired". Those of us infringed on either learn to confront those who feel it OK to take what wasn't meant to be theirs and by doing so often come off in a selfish fashion raising the question/debate "how can an idea be owned" or we silently swallow our feelings and learn to distance ourselves from those who cannot nurture without taking.
In the end regardless of which end we are on we all learn from the experience.

© Simone Rene 2010