The well is …dry?

I had an awful thought last week.

What if I run out of ideas?

What if there is a finite number that we are all allowed? Some people never come close to using them up so they never notice, but others blow through them, sharing them here and there like gangbusters and then in their mid thirties just go blank. For all of eternity.

No more craft projects, no more baking concoctions, no more writing, no more photography, no more trips, no more painting.

That would be bad. Who would I be if I wasn’t the creative one?

I had this thought as I was struggling with an ad campaign last week. I sent it off to be reviewed and was just drained. It was mostly driven by me thinking if they didn’t like it I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Would I have another round of creative left in me for that project? At that moment, after a 12 hour day, I really wasn’t so sure.

In the light of a new day in a new week I know I would have rallied and gone through the process again, but it really got me thinking about a well of ideas. I mean I know that ideas at least for me, are really more like a chain, one inter-linking into another. And if your brain is like mine you can get from the Beatles to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to art deco architecture in about a half a second. So the chances of me running out of ideas is pretty negligible.

But what if there is a tally? And each time you tossed one out there your bank goes -1? Would we be so free with the ideas? Would I let my mind rest more? I think it would sure be a lot quieter in there. Maybe it would make the ideas that are brought forward and expressed harder to dismiss. Maybe it would make people trust in their ideas more, or maybe civilization as we know it would come to a grinding halt.

Hard to say. Sounds like an episode of Sliders.