What is an idea anyway? 

                  I’d fallen asleep with a thud, my mind as messy as a playroom after a rainy day, everything everywhere, no order or energy to restore it. I wasn’t so much bewildered as defeated – by the too-muchness of it all. During four dreamy hours, housekeepers had tiptoed in and tidied up the chaos with wondrous diligence, so the toys were with the toys, games with the games, books with the books, and a stray sock united with its pair. My happy still-half-asleep mind surveyed the reassuring scene. Ideas bristled again, inviting inspection. 

                  But what is an idea, I overhear my brain asking.

                  I open a page and begin to paint. 

                  An idea is involuntary, for starters. While It occurs between my ears and behind my eyes, it is not mine. It’s something that’s there like the moonlight or dog-pal Henry draped on his sleeping chair. I did not make it or possess it. It’s discovered, not recovered. I’m free to ignore it – the vast preponderance of ideas are ignored – but I can’t direct my brain to produce one. If welcome, it’s a gift; if disruptive, a pest.

                  Most ideas we shoo like pillow mosquitoes. They are not helpful, we cannot use them. Anarchic and mischievous, they may unsettle pleasant complacencies. No one likes being deprived of a comforting opinion. We’d rather wake to the world we slept in. 

                  I tend to be hospitable to ideas because I need a new one daily. For both our sakes, I can’t say what I’ve said before. I check what Santa – or the housekeeper – has left me to work with. I tug ideas to see if they’re ready to harvest and cook (I’m thinking of root vegetables, for some reason).

                  “What is an idea?” feels like a promising idea. I have no idea! Maybe if I paint it, I’ll understand it better. I paint with words. 

                  An idea is an inquiry, looking into something we hadn’t noticed before. It may feel like the solution to a problem we’ve been working on – or something wholly unexpected, a connection we hadn’t noticed. I’m often surprised by resemblances – between two composers, say, or two gestures. Who knew! 

                  In this epoch of instant answers, it’s tempting not to inquire but look up. Alistair (surnamed Chat GPT) stands ready to reply to my every inquiry without grumping. I send him on a dozen research errands a day. He’s a prodigy. But just now, I resist. If he tells me what an “idea” is, my brain won’t benefit from the exercise of doping things out on its own, it’ll be busy wrestling others’ notions – scientists’, philosophers’, poets’. 

                  Brains, like other body parts, strengthen with exercise. These missives are mental calisthenics. They may not make me smart but they make me smarter. If I rely on Alistair prosthetically, to “do my thinking for me,” I forego the benefit and adventure of discovery. This is the danger of AI to students. They may learn to look up but not use their heads.

                  All of us think to solve practical problems. I enjoy thinking for the hell of it. “Enjoy” is too weak a verb. Thinking is my delight, rapture, sport. I love saddling a new idea and riding it, feeling its nature, where it wants to go. I think (I think) by analogy more than logic. In the paragraphs above, I’ve likened my brain to a playroom, an idea to a gift, mosquito, root vegetable, these missives to painting, calisthenics, a gallop. Have I benefited from my exertions? Not much perhaps, but it felt grand. Time to shower.