A humble word - Inspiration Monday guest post

It’s been three weeks since the last Inspiration Monday and I hope you missed it as much as I did. I’m planning on doing some small changes about Inspiration Monday in the near future but I can’t tell you everything just yet.

Today I’m very honoured to host the amazing Caterpillar who writes at Musings And Confessions of a Wandering Mind. She is a brilliant writer and a lovely lady and I’m really lucky to know her (I truly hope I’ll meet her in person some day). Those of you who don’t know her yet should visit her blog right after you read this splendid piece she wrote for my blog:

Starlight here had asked me to write an article about inspiration…and I sat down thinking that this was going to be one easy thing…ha! Couldn’t have been any more mistaken! I thought long and hard about it…I tried repeating the word over and over in my head in the hope that The letters would spring to life and tell me what they wanted me to write…I-N-S-P-I-R-A-T-I-O-N…the word looked simple enough…a little too simple, actually…because it’s this humble word which brought about the big inventions…the lights that blinked to life at the click of a switch, the voice of a loved one close to your ears though they are located miles away when you answered that telephone, the wheels that turned and turned some more to make sure that you could travel anywhere you wanted to without tiring your legs out, the face to face conversations you can have with your Mom when you miss her, even when both of you are in two different continents. 

And does it stop at that? No…it’s this word which inspired all those amazing books out there which allowed us to fly on the magic carpet into the mystical lands, to go on an investigative journey to find that murderer on loose, to sigh at the romantic words uttered by the hero of our dreams, to laugh out loud at the blunder of the well-meaning but naïve girl in the story, to reflect on the complexities of relationships the characters seem to be burdened with. It’s this one word which made Wordsworth muse about the beauty of daffodils, Michelangelo carve the exquisite Pieta, Leonardo paint the enigmatic Mona Lisa and Beethoven create soulful symphonies. 

What can this word do for you, you wonder? The opportunities are uncountable…this word, single handedly allows you to take the empty canvas of a day and fill it with bright, beautiful pictures, to look beyond the obvious and come up with some brilliant ideas which might mean a lot, to look at a problem and come up with an opportunity to overcome it rather than worrying about it, a word which brings out the creator, the inventor, the designer in you… 

Inspiration for me, is a friend, who shows me something and whispers to me “Why not”…a friend who shows me “the path less travelled by” as Robert Frost rightly put it. Inspiration, for me is the invisible someone who helps me look at a problem nagging me and tell me “we’ll find a way around it, trust me”, inspiration is the jester who colors my world when it becomes a little shabby. Inspiration, for me, is someone who allows me to have fun and laugh out loud even when life looks like an uphill struggle…Inspiration, more importantly, is who allows me to be myself through words, scribbles and paints spilled.  Inspiration, my friends, is the invisible friend who will always be by my side, ready to help and lend me a smile. And so, my request to you is this; go find that invisible friend called Inspiration, wake him up, give him a little shake and you will find that pot of gold hidden within you...