I don’t know when inspiration happens to you, but for me, it’s in the wee small hours of the morning before my mind and emotions become the loudest voices in the room. It’s when I first awake, when I am not quite “all there”. It’s in the magic original minutes before the myriad of daily concerns rush back into my consciousness. That’s when my inspiration manifests and when anything seems possible.

In those moments I can see the path ahead clearly and know what I have to do. No concerns, constraints, or counter-arguments. Inspiration is in charge and speaks with a certainty and enthusiasm which is utterly convincing.

It’s like I’m riding the crest of a wave, rolling across the ocean, high up, racing toward some unknown shore. For those magic moments, where imagination and creativity go hand in hand, under a clear blue sky, I have an unobstructed view of both the past and the future, a timeline stretching out for miles. This is the place where dreams come true.

I may long for a beach where surfers and bathers eagerly await my arrival. I imagine their joy and anticipation as my rolling waters splash up onto the sand surrounding them in gifts of art and inspiration.

But I’ve learned that my inspiration cannot always predict the shore. My waters can just as easily land on rocky outcrops, jagged; disserted, and indifferent - quite unmoved by my arrival. This is no beach. Its harsh welcome shatters my inspiration, smashing my vision and often, along with it, my confidence and even my hope.

Some of the most talented people I know have given up their gifts and visions because they listened to their ‘rational’ minds which screamed at such times, “Fool, what were you thinking? What kind of welcome did you expect? Your gifts are not wanted.”

A heartless “I told you so” from our own intellect can be brutally devastating especially when it uses “reality” as a weapon. It’s hard enough to elude the rejection of others but when the rebuke comes from our own minds, constantly taking the lay of the land, measuring the odds of success, and building what amounts to a case for failure, it's damn near impossible to resist. But resist it we must and not just for the sake of our art but perhaps for the sake of our sanity. Its only real answer is to give up and that’s no answer at all.

As creatives we are not only crafting our art out of inspiration, we are creating ourselves. We are becoming our own identity. Only we can decide what is real. Doubts, disappointments, and fears turn us away from our inspiration and our truth.

Perhaps the greatest creativity is turning every setback, disappointment and delay into deeper insight and inspiration; turning a negative into a positive. Instead of being destroyed by “reality” we might say, “Okay, what can I learn from this, and how can I reconstitute what happened into a higher and deeper artistic wave? We do not allow for defeat because we turn every setback to our advantage. We never give up. That’s the power we have over our own reaction should our waters meet an unwelcoming shore. We turn it into a positive without ever anticipating it in the future. Only the positive should be part of our vision because that is the way to survival.

How do we maintain the balance between positive self-criticism necessary for artistic improvement and optimistic anticipation of finding an audience for your work? Not easy but we have to go rolling on, go on looking. Faith demands it. Courage, inspiration, dedication, and resilience are the qualities we need. They are born out of a deep and resounding love for our work, and for ourselves. There is always room for improvement. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone, somewhere on some quiet beach looking out at the ocean and waiting for just what we have to offer. An unwelcoming shore signifies nothing. It does not prove that our vision was an illusion.

So what do we do when our wave lands on rocky shores?

1. Resolve to never give up – even if you are ignored. Intent is everything. We need to move our attitude from ‘trying’ to intending, to knowing we will succeed. Not everything is under our control even then, but we have optimized ourselves and our expectations.
2. Look for, seek a different audience – a different shore.
3. Re-invent, and rejuvenate our offering. Look at your work for different ways to sell it, different markets, different methods. Look for related opportunities, an example might be converting a stage play into a novel, for example.
4. Ask your Voice for direction, a new idea, a new contact, or something you haven’t already thought of. There is a solution to every problem, and the creative process demands it.

The truth is, we are not the water - we’re the wave. It’s the water that gets smashed against the rocks, but the wave is energy, and creativity and no matter where it lands it is indestructible and moves through the water unharmed and undiminished. It can only be transformed. It is never lost unless we lose it ourselves.

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