Exactly What Is Inspiration?***z-headeradsense.shtml*** What is inspiration? It gets talked about a lot on sites like this one but I don't believe I've ever read an in-depth explanation as to exactly what it means. I believe that it's the necessary first step in getting from point A to point B. Or to be more poetic, I would answer the question by saying, "It is the spark which ignites the fire that fuels achievement." I made that up--really.  Getting from point A to point B is something that we typically take for granted. But regardless of how simple the journey may appear on the surface, advancing from one place to another is always complex. For example, consider a walk from the family room to the kitchen. It starts with a summons; "Dinner's ready!" Your ear drums pick up the vibrations from the cook's voice and convert them into sounds which are then interpreted as language. You rise from your chair, walk to the kitchen and take a seat. Seems like a pretty innocuous trek, and compared to a manned space flight it is. But it requires hundreds of muscle contractions/expansions, a complex cardiovascular system, neurology and a lymphatic support system to walk those 20 feet. And the real complexity is just getting started; wait till the food enters your stomach! We're hardly limited to physical journeys in our lives. Moving from one point to another without requiring transportation might be called "personal growth", which we often attempt to achieve on our own: I guess that's why it's often called "self help". Personal growth might be described as "Here's where I am (point A) and here's where I want to be (point b)." For example:
And we could go on indefinitely. What all these statements have in common is that they express a desire not only to move from one point to another, but to improve our condition as a result of the move.
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I think it's safe to say that the desire to improve our lot in life is a uniquely human condition. So how do we get from here to there? The ratio of books written to answer that question to stars in the Milky Way Galaxy is 1:1; that is, several hundred trillion. And while the word count of this commentary would hardly fill a comic book I would like to espouse my version and attempt to answer the question "What is inspiration?". It all begins quite subtly...