Have you ever had an idea you thought was so great, you immediately went ahead and started to make it happen?
On the other hand, has there ever been a time when you were trying to come up with an idea but couldn’t come up with one you thought was worth making happen so you kept on thinking and thinking until an idea came which you thought was worth making happen but then after further thought found the idea corny or trite or boring or tedious or vague or dangerous or insipid or haughty or shallow or offensive or lame or overused or not cool enough or too trendy or been done before? Have you ever tried to save this idea because you convinced yourself it had potential but deep down you knew that the only potential it had was potential to be ignored by those whose opinions you misguidedly think matter? Have you ever tried to save this idea from getting shelved in the deepest recesses of your memory among the innumerable other decidedly unworthy ideas by tweaking it? Have you ever tried tweaking that idea so much that it ended up becoming another idea altogether but still not definitively worth making happen? Has all this tweaking and thinking ever caused you to stop and ask yourself why you were trying to come up with an idea in the first place? Has all this tweaking and thinking ever led you to question the circumstances that brought you to this stressful situation? Has all this ever led you to question the choices you’ve made and how you came to make them? Have you ever questioned your choice of material; your choice of technique; your choice of style; your choice of schools; your choice of teachers; your choice of influences; your choice of friends; your career choices; your food choices; your life choices?
Has all this ever led you to question your very existence and then realize that questioning one’s existence has been done before and wallowing in self-doubt is corny, trite, boring, tedious, lame, too cool and utterly useless because you still don’t have that thing you were looking for in the first place, that umm…idea?
Not me. Nope. Nu-uh.
Juan Alcazaren
July 2016
