the challenge
After a couple of days in which we had different types of experiences and insights, today we go back to the core of creativity: a creative exploration assignment.
Use any dead-time you have throughout the day to look around you mindfully for Insights inspired by the Tower of Babel Seed. Think of different interpretations or aspects of the phrase, and capture the Insight in your Insight Journal.
my insight
From a distance, there’s nothing exceptional about this urban light pole. Every few meters there is one, and if you don’t take a closer look, they all look the same.
But when you come closer, you soon realize that what seems to be a platform to place the light high above the street is, in fact, a public notice board with dozens of commercials, stickers, and remains of flyers nobody will be able to read anymore.
With dozen of items written in at least three languages I could recognize, and with a great sense of mess no one can really understand, this innocent light pole became a tower of Babel. Nobody around me even tried to stop by and read the messages. Maybe their owners only wished to send these messages out to the world. Perhaps they didn’t really expect to be heard.
Maybe…
reflection
I photograph a lot in the streets of Tel-Aviv, and I have a special affection for layered messages you can barely read, whether they are painted, sprayed, or glued on walls or random urban artifacts. So, seeing this light pole wasn’t surprising by itself. I’ve seen similar “message boards” hundreds or thousands of times.
And yet, this time, I saw it differently. Today, was the first time I thought of this kind of a “message board” as a tower of Babel. This was not the result of some in-depth thinking process or trying to come up with an original metaphor. It just happened. But I can’t ignore the contribution of the Seed to that.
A Seed can work in different ways. Today, it acted as a filter or a lens through which I observed everything around me. It’s not that everything around me looked like a tower of Babel. But, if there was something which could be remotely associated with this phrase, the Seed brought it to the front and enhanced the effect. This is how the association in the Insight was created.
And the same idea can be used when you look for ideas or solutions in the context of a problem you are trying to solve. If you think of your challenge as a Seed (and phrase it abstractly enough), your brain can focus on surprising things around you that can help you address the problem — things which otherwise would go unnoticed.
mental notes
- Use a Seed as a lens to see things differently and create surprising associations and opportunities.
now it is your turn… be creative!