Life of an Idea

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

― Oscar Wilde

Thoughts are our constant companion. They accompany us in boredom, in leisure, in joy and sorrow, in moments of profound experience. Amongst all those thoughts, a handful attain the distinction of being an idea.

What separates an idea from a thought is its inherent creativeness. Ideas may lead to other ideas and thoughts, almost always in a characteristic radical and innovative fashion. They are the profoundest of thoughts leaving behind significantly more impact on our mind than the regular ones.

Ideas are seemingly spontaneous - emergence of a strange order from the sea of chaos. But I believe they are far from being spontaneous or random. They are deterministic outcomes in the guise of serendipity. Imagine you are the person to witness the first living creature arising from the ocean. You would think that the creature was spontaneously created in the water but it is in fact a result of millions of years of biochemical reactions stealthily orchestrated by the Nature. Ideas are creatures of such sort, their history often untraceable and we fail to connect the dots. So their emergence from the boiling pot of thoughts that is our mind, gives us the illusion of spontaneity.

Ideas may last the entirety of our lifetime. Many are lost along the way, tugged away in remote pockets or drawers and never revisited. Many are abandoned with the impression that they were silly or stupid. Some of those silly ideas may reemerge in the future, and upon scrutiny, they may now pass to be not so silly as was thought. Some ideas give rise to even grander ideas. Some ideas see the light of the day while most are condemned to oblivion, never reaching the conclusion of the journey from an idea to an action.

The best ideas are the ones that survive beyond one’s lifetime. They live among the successors, like a parasite eating their brains, and can live long enough to bring about a revolution. Some are fortunate to witness their ideas bringing such radical transformations in their own lifetime, others not so much. But they still live long after they are gone in the form of those ideas they had conjured up in an insignificant moment that would carry a great deal of significance for the future of mankind.

For centuries we have seen ideas altering the course of mankind's history. Ideas have saved people, killed people, freed people, imprisoned people. Ideas are the double-edged swords that in spectacular fashions decide our fate. We must embrace them yet be cautious of them. Because in a world full of ills and evils, ideas provide us with respite and like all good medicines, they are also the most devious of poisons - poisons of the mind.

Newton (1795) by William Blake. Source: Wikipedia