Brain Sparks: Why We Should Attend to Those Flashes of Clarity

The signs are always there. We just need to let them reveal their meaning.

A brain spark is akin to a brainstorm, but for me, it is more a flash, and inspiration, a sudden burst of clarity in the mind.  A brain spark can hit you when you least expect it.  Usually, though, it comes after a good pondering.  Some might call it a meditation.  A meditation is intentional, though.  Brain sparks don't come through intention.  You can't will them.  They just suddenly flash in your mind.  Everything is spontaneously combusting into ideas and motivators.  They excite the conscious and reveal the unconscious.  This is why I think it is extremely important to attend to them,  to pay attention to the spark and maybe even metaphorical blow on it until it bursts into a lovely flame in the mind's eye.

I had a brain spark this afternoon while trying to take a brief nap.  Not sure why it came as it did, startling me like a shooting star across my inner horizon, but it did.  Perhaps it is because I have been re-directing my attentions and intentions inward and pushing them outward.  I have stopped once again burning time and energy trying to change things I ultimately cannot change.  What I can do is recognize that fun is important. Work, for example, can be the expression of talents and images through writing and photography and any other form of art,  and it can be fun.  Yipes!

For several years I have been wrestling with writing memoirs about the life and times of a certain self I carry with me.  It is me then and the me I have become.  I've started and stopped, in fits and spurts, but always lost my way or made creative u-turns, (returning to old thought patterns or inner critics that haunt my muse),  to the point I thought as recent as the past few weeks, it just wasn't gonna happen.  I surrendered to that possibility.  Sometimes acquiescence is the best thing you can do before the brain sparks appear.

It was in this labile state of mind the answer flashed in my brain.  Just tell the stories.  Group them around a theme, a place, in vignettes, however they come.  Create the armature to support the events of my life.  In other words, pick a place and just write what comes up.  Like, for instance, grade school.  The incident with a bully.  The feeling of carrying a sack lunch when you really want a hot lunch for a quarter with two cents extra for chocolate milk.  Navigating through the subtle (and not so subtle) social circles of the playground.  It all just begins to pour out.

So that is why I think it is important to pay attention to both minor and major brain sparks.  You can choose which ones to act on.  The important ones will be so compelling, you won't be able to think about much else until you act.  It's God/Spirit/The Universe/Natural Selection/Serendipity...whatever you call it...jumpstarting what is normally a dormant, but intense, desire to create.  

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