Thought Picnic: Between flawed diamonds and flawless pebbles

The battle for the perfect

“Leave your mind alone; your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.” Ray Bradbury.

Intuition as Google defines it “is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”

It goes without saying that in the realm of blogging, conscious reasoning is the enemy of the instinct to just write and allow the flow of whatever urge to write there is. There are times when I just begin to type at my keyboard or write in my notepad things that are just there to write.

Before I get enough of that spring of words into unstoppable traction, my mind interjects and interrupts, fearful of what arrangement or words might emanate and stemming the flow by channelling what was in freeform into the processing of thoughts and views, becoming the gamekeeper of expression.

The fearful interloper

Yes, my mind almost always gets in the way and at that time, it is almost impossible to politely ask it to move out of the way and allow free rein to what is innately there to express.

Intuition in writing can be your internal madness, a madness with a veneer of genius or even stupidity, you can never really know. If you can find a place to just scream, it is surprising what release it can be, jettisoning all inhibitions and letting ripping without abandon.

It is not thoughtlessness, per se, practice over time does create an inclination to do things literally subconsciously or even unconsciously. Taking away the impediments of the conscious might well be the panacea to the dreaded plague of Writer’s Block where we burden ourselves beyond our expression with what reception and assessment would be.

When Voltaire in his moral poem La Bégueule (French) wrote,

Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien,
Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

(In his writings, a wise Italian
says that the best is the enemy of good.)

I do not believe what he intended was to make do with the imperfect, but that we should allow what naturally comes to be itself without adjustment or embellishment. Sometimes, the inspired or the natural is ruined by intervention.

"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without." Confucius