Bored and Barcoded

I am rarely short of something to write about but when I get overly tired, my mind wanders and fails to concentrate on what I have tasked it. Today I got a comment about someone being bored which I find an increasingly common disease of the young despite having copious amounts of access and things they could be doing. How can one be bored and still have access to Steem? It is no secret I like to work and it is also no secret that I think that remaining active is something that I value. There are various reasons for it and, they aren't all Steem related.

An active mind is a creative mind, an adaptive mind, a mind that finds solutions and workarounds whether they are necessary or not. An active mind is one that has used and understood its toolset well enough that it can turn itself to any task and have a pretty good time. There is no time for boredom in a creative mind as the mind is continually moving and even in stillness like meditative practice, it is a process of activity. Yes, stillness can be activity, just like choosing not to make a decision is still a decision made.

The mind is always moving, it is always creating, most just don't listen to it, dismiss it or not even notice that it is running while they distract themselves with a thousand other attention hooks. This last one is likely the problem with the young, no attention span and unless being fed something that is pre-chewed, they don't want to work.

Work, that word comes up a lot in my writing but it is what it is, thinking is work, which is likely why so many people avoid it like the plague. Well, they think they are avoiding it but they are still actually thinking, just not about anything that is likely so valuable to think about. Consumers of thoughts and mostly, what people eat are the thoughts of others, the creations of others.

Think for yourself.

What does that even mean, who else can you think for? It isn't about the thinking though is it, it is about the acceptance of what one is saying without thought into whether what is being said is useful or not. Use itself is going to depend on many factors and while one person may find this extremely boring, another might find it incredibly useful. What is comes down to is how one thinks of it and, what comes to mind for development from it.

When it comes to creativity, the source of inspiration is of very little importance, it is all about the processing and continued development of what comes to mind that is valuable. The most mundane sentence could create a spark of inspiration that changes the world, that is how creation works.

There are actually three core components to creation; thought, word, action. The spark of inspiration fires the thought, the mind takes that thought and builds a framework of language and then, a movement happens that takes the narrative created and acts upon it. Creation happens. How hard is it to be creative? It isn't hard at all, it is the natural process of being human.

The art of life isn't in the medium used, it is in the creative pursuit to turn that medium into something that one believes is valuable. I am not talking about price value here, I am talking about the intrinsic value associated with being able to take that spark of inspiration, processing it and then getting it out of the head and into wherever it needs to be. Art is everyone, no matter the beauty aspect of it but, beautiful art is simple, unlabored. Art can take a massive amount of work to be effortless and the most skilled artists find the process simple, but not easy.

Sometimes I wonder what people see as the walk through this world, do they see the beauty inherent or, are they so focused on finding what they have been told to find that they miss what actually has value? The picture above, is it beautiful? I find it so and not because I took it. All it is is a little barcode on a cardboard box but look closely, what do you see, what comes to mind?

Nothing? How is that possible? Listen to yourself.

No, I mean it, listen to yourself - what do you hear? When you ask yourself what you should be doing right now, or, what you could be doing when bored, why aren't you doing those things? Does what you do get you any closer to where you want to go, does what you have been told to find beautiful and consume satisfy who you are, or who you want to be, could be? How are you both bored and complaining about life? how can that be because if you are complaining, you have things to work on, don't you? Oh, as a consumer of others work, you leave it up to them to satisfy your needs - that is going to end badly.

You want to be inspired perhaps but the thing is, inspiration has no home in a dulled mind, which is just the way they like it as consumers are easily led, while creators are impossible to cage. Because, even in a cage the mind is free to explore, free to roam, free to be and never be owned. The life of a consumer is a life of mental incarceration, fed scraps of another's creation, labelled, packaged and sorted to think exactly as told.

Barcoded so they'll always be able to track your mind, no matter where you are.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]