The human mind wanders. Whether we’re doing what we love, or suffering the agony of trying to pass the time, our minds wander into an unfocused haze.
This unfocused haze contains all kinds of wonderful things that we all too often miss in our haste to get back to work.
However, this wandering focus is both a weakness and a strength of the human mind. Often these moments of wandering thought return nothing. Sometimes they return terrible ideas. But sometimes they provide us with moments of brilliant creative insight that seem to come to us with spontaneous unpredictability.
To paraphrase the brilliant Latvian Chess Grandmaster, Mikhail Tal, very often it’s better to follow the intuition that springs into your mind after deep thought and contemplation rather than carefully considering every possible condition that may arise.
To take more interesting pictures, we need to become more interesting people. This allows us to have more productive sessions of unfocused contemplation. In these moments, there will spring forth brilliant ideas that will inform your art.
To the outsider, you might appear brilliant. But it wasn’t deep thought that gave you the idea, it was your ability to give up searching for the right decision and spend time in the hazy unfocused world that we drift into every so often.
The great artist can relax and fall into this state of creative insight from which he extracts brilliance.