Larry Kilham Blog |
From your pillow through your window
you travel to your land of dreams. Its special places only you know - their vistas bathed in sunny gleams. Flowers carpet the valley, birds chirp from the trees. From them you absorb energy while you float in the breeze. Now put structure in your vision to give your life new meaning, and you can do with what you’re given with a joyous and prideful feeling. @2020 Larry Kilham We walked the desert in our land. We saw shards and wrecks scattered in the sand. Not broken pots or pillars of stone, but defunct computers and pieces of bone. We heard a ghostly voice from a gossamer muse, “Look around for what's nice-- Something besides plastics and rust. The creations of art and music fed the worms and now are dust.” Then we asked: “Can our creations be saved from becoming dust? Can there be resurrection from the scrapyards of rust?” Then we won’t need to colonize space - there’ll be magic here for the human race. © 2019, 2023 Larry Kilham Revised, 2023 See more of my poetry here. To be creative, you must unleash your curiosity, quest for knowledge, and propensity for noticing things. No lesser minds than Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein were noted for being passionately curious, using their imagination as their prime lens to see ahead and their creativity to solve problems. Einstein wrote: "The important thing is not to stop questioning." You should also notice all kinds of things, however unrelated to your quest they may seem. When Will Carrier noticed the apparently odd behavior of water droplets in fog, he had stumbled into the basics of air conditioning, the ground-breaking technology of his Carrier Corporation. “For three weeks, the Huygens probe had coasted, dormant, after detaching from the Cassini spacecraft and being sent on its way to Titan. Those of us watching anxiously felt a deep personal connection with the probe. Not only had we worked on the mission for a large part of our careers, but we had developed its systems and instrumentation by putting our minds in its place, to think through how it would function on an alien and largely unknown world.” So wrote Ralph Lorenz and Christophe Sotin in the Scientific American about their great space adventure.
These space scientists nailed it: to make new theories, new inventions, and other great creations, we have to do better than adjusting existing theories and designs. We must forcefully move our mind beyond the existing thinking about the subject. We must move out of our conscious world and focus our mind in a new place occupied only by the new creation. Reduced to its simplest elements, what you are required to do is solve a problem or construct a work of art without a complete set of instructions or without comprehensive data. In a creative process you are using your imagination to make an appealing or useful whole from a set of components that would not appear to be sufficient or adequate for the job. To do this you need to see beyond mere recollection or simple association. You are projecting the mind’s eye to another point in space or time. You are putting your conscious being in an entirely different surrounding environment. One way of looking at this process is that you will be creating a new mind out of your regular mind. Einstein placed himself in speeding trains, moving clocks and elevators in space. This was more than metaphorical thinking; it was a mind transforming itself to another place. Einstein’s strength came from his imagination and creativity. For the most part his mathematics is a precise description of the relationships he discovered rather than the way he arrived at those relationships. See more at the invention page. |