Focus-Pocus

The idea. The precious, slippery, pain-in-the-ass idea. It’s the thing that keeps you up at night, staring at the ceiling like some tragic philosopher who has just realized that socks go missing in the laundry because they want to. The idea is what separates the people who “do things” from the people who “would totally do things if they just had the right idea.” And the worst part? The idea does not care about you.

You think you can summon it? You think you can sit down with a blank piece of whatever and a steaming cup of coffee, maybe light the right lamps for the work like some kind of ritual, and the idea will just arrive? Please, please, please. The idea is not a dog. The idea is a feral raccoon that will only appear when you are looking directly in the opposite direction, preferably while holding something breakable.

And yet, we chase it. We construct elaborate rituals. We read books about creativity, which is the intellectual equivalent of googling “how to be cool.” We sit at our desks, frowning at blank screens, convinced that if we just try harder, the idea will crack under the pressure. But the more you push, the more it digs in its little raccoon heels and refuses to budge. Because ideas do not want to be caught. They want to be discovered.

The best ideas show up when you are doing something completely unrelated. Washing dishes. Staring at a crack on your wall and wondering if it’s always looked that much like an old man screaming. Taking the tram with your child. Or when listening to someone very important telling you about something very important. And then—bam. The idea drops out of nowhere, fully formed, like an annoying musical kid bursting into song in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation. It wasn’t there, and now it is. And it is everything.

But the minute you need an idea? When you’re on a deadline, when someone is waiting for you to be THE creative genius? Forget it. Your brain turns into an abandoned mall. Just echoing thoughts of “maybe something about… the internet?” while a lone tumbleweed rolls by. You try to shake something loose, but all you get are terrible half-thoughts, the kind of ideas that should come with a warning label: This concept has never been funny. Do not attempt to develop further.

So what’s the solution? Patience? Letting go? Just living your life and trusting that the idea will come? That sounds so deeply awful. It also seems to be the only thing that works. You think deeply, and then you forget. You let the concept marinate somewhere in the back of your mind while you go outside counting grass or whatever it is normal people do. And eventually, when you’re least expecting it, the idea will saunter back in, acting like it was waiting for you the whole time.

And you’ll take it, with the weary resignation of a raccoon accepting that, yes, it must once again climb into a dumpster to retrieve what is rightfully its own. Because what choice do you have?