Inspiration Comes at a Great Cost

Most people would like to feel inspired without paying the cost

Inspiration is a beast; it’s a demon. It does not give you anything without first getting its pound of flesh. It devours you from inside. It attacks the depths of your existence and thrusts its wicked claws wounding your very core. Creativity has a dark side, a CNN report said.

In the 2016 movie Split, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, the beast, played by James McAvoy, spares Casey her life as she has suffered pain. The beast tells her that she is “pure” and more evolved due to her being “broken.” He says those who have not endured great pain, do not deserve to live.

Inspiration comes at a cost. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, says the first law of thermodynamics. The total sum of all positive and negative energy is always zero. Life experiences suck your energy, producing inspiration in the process, the way a black hole sucks light energy, and then spits out particles of matter. A great tragedy gives birth to unusual instances of inspiration.

Before the 21st century, when the artists did not know some of the scientific tidbits, they’d try to get inspired by lovely spring seasons, handsome princes, and pretty damsels. Or it came from the god within. It never gave birth to a masterpiece except in the womb of the imagination of artists who had suffered in war, love, and madness. Renaissance began after the Black Death devastated Europe in the 14th century, the French revolution produced Voltaire and Rousseau, and the World War I gave us Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. The decryption of Enigma encoded messages during the World War II led Alan Turing to help invent the modern computer. Inspiration is cheap in times of crisis.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt

If you positively want to get inspired, stop living in lalaland. Leave the comfort of your mind to experience life in its raw form. Inspiration is not something that will come to you while you sit and wait. Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” Some say grit and hard work matter way more.

In psychology, inspiration is a completely internal process.

Inspiration demands new life experiences. Neuroscience tells us that when we read and try to digest complex information and ideas, our brains develop new connections and fuse older links inside our brains. The brain rewires itself. The new wiring makes new creative insights possible. But only to avoid extreme debilitating mental agony does the brain completely reinvent itself.

But there may be a way to avoid too much suffering to stay inspired. The method is to feel compassion for those who are in pain. By being more compassionate, you’ll feel the pain of others, but it will make you stronger in the long run. When you perceive only your own pain, you feel alone and unhappy, but when you feel genuine compassion for a friend, there is a satisfying feeling that you are helping her.

The artist’s inspiration comes out of unresolved psychological conflict or childhood trauma. ~Sigmund Freud

Conclusion

Redefine your experience of suffering of life. Label it as something helpful.

1. Don’t let the suffering of life numb your sensitivities.
2. Welcome the pain if it is inevitable.
3. Believe that this pain is going to make you better.
4. Let this pain make you more inspired.
5. Let it give you a sharp wit.
6. Let it give your work more depth.
7. Let your inspired self be reborn through this pain from the womb of your own artistic existence.

This rebirth is the only way that you can become more inspired than before. Or you may choose to pray to Odin, the Ancient Norse God, to make you more inspired.

Edward Young’s agreed with psychologists who tried to locate inspiration in the mind — not the divine or demonic — but still considered it of supernatural essence, in his essay Conjectures on Original Composition in 1759.