How to fall in love with ideas?

Ideas come to us suddenly, involuntarily, sometimes while driving and we can’t do anything about them except try not to forget them. If we don’t write them down quickly, they disappear, they dissolve like the fabric of dreams in the morning, like a grain of salt that falls to the bottom of a long glass of water.

In ancient times, ideas were thought to come from “demons”minor deities who carried the messages of the gods to humans. Now the demon looks like something negative to us, but originally it could be something good or something bad. Its etymological root is ‘da’ which means to distribute; thus, Eros was the “demon” who distributed infatuation, while Thanatothe son of the night, distributed death. Socrates said a ‘demon’ dictated wisdom to him from a distant place.

The ideas, then, did not come from the person, but came from outside. However, this changed during the Renaissance, when the person became the center of the universe and the “demon” or genius ceased to be external, now the individual himself was the genius. Ideas were the possession and creation of a particular person to be honored*. Scientists and artists were thus very close to arrogance, excess, irrationality, exactly in the hubris**.

But, although man may believe that he is the center of everything, from daily experience we know the opposite. Pablo Boullosa talks about how in Spanish we say that ideas “come to us”, we don’t invent them, or create them, rather they come to us; As the song goes “Our was just a coincidence / Same time, same boulevard”. And if the circumstances had been different, we would have had other ideas or none, but not the same.

To occur comes from ob (against) and currere (to run). Ideas along these lines stop us, interrupt the flow of time and disturb our emotions: “a sad idea came to his mind and his afternoon was filled with nostalgia”. Sometimes they also make us happy, they deprive us of sleep, of the desire to eat and encourage us to follow them wherever our thoughts lead them..

Ideas can hurt and be pleasant at the same time. many years ago, maybe a long time ago before Hippocrates, there was the first person who could anticipate his own death. He realized that he had the same symptoms as some of his deceased patients and it “occurred” to him that he would no longer live. It was a wonderful idea, which filled him with enthusiasm, maybe in the future they could anticipate death 4, 5 or even 20 years earlier and then they could live more intensely. An excellent idea, even if this person was bitter to know that in his case, he only had a painful day or two ahead of him.

It’s hard to like ideas like this, entities that have no sympathy for us, who don’t care whether we find them pleasurable or not, and although this article is titled “How to fall in love with ideas”, it seems to me that this is the most appropriate moment to confess I do not know how it can be done, even less how to advise others, because we do not command ourselves from the heart. Perhaps the best way to love them is poetry, as Octavio Paz wrote:

Hear

thoughts,

see

* See Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius

** https://www.samfyc.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/v20n2_CD_nosSobra.pdf

*** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7waNRNBeDTo