no ideas

I was thinking about this graffiti I saw on the side of the building outside that read, NO IDEAS.

There was nothing else around it (yet). No artwork, no stickers, no nothing. It’s as if all around it was a blank canvas for more ideas. I even had this immediate thought about how whoever wrote this had at least the one idea to write NO IDEAS, which is an idea in of itself, no?

I had the idea to make this a writing prompt today, but then I ended up writing something else. But, ultimately, I flowed back to this idea. 

Those two words: NO IDEAS. Side by side feel so frightening. Yeah, that sounds super emo and over the top to say, but as someone who is all about ideas, the thought of having none is fucking scary. Can you imagine not having an imagination? 

To never have free thought — self will, even? Which, ironically, is what I started this entry off with and how if we just let go and let God (as the slogan says), we can go more in flow and let our Higher Power help us ideate. I think that's fair enough — that even though you’re letting go of complete control of thought, you make space for new ideas that your Higher Power is guiding your mind, body, heart and soul towards. They are still your ideas because your Higher Power is you — you are God, the universe, nature. Whoever your HP is, you are it, too.

Wow, did this NO IDEAS maybe prompt, prompt some weird random shit?! Good stuff I’d say. 

Ideas are a starting point. And maybe that’s all this graffiti artist wanted to create. To start with an idea-provoking prompt for other artists to add their ideas alongside it. Or maybe it was to tickle the minds of passerbys: from dog walkers and drunken club goers to parents with prams to think about, percolate and ideate on the idea of not having any ideas. Is it really frightening in the end? 

Or is it freeing? Because when you close off the idea of even having ideas, you open up and make space for more new, better and even worse ideas. It’s not to say no ideas are bad — or is it? Maybe it's just to say that having no ideas is normal. 

Sometimes we just don’t know. Sometimes we do — and that’s when we free flow with our thoughts and a little thing called ideas.

And I’ll stop there before this NO IDEAS idea loses its idea.