Ideas also emerge through interaction with the world.
Jeff Goins says the discipline of traveling to another country disrupts our comfort, educates us in other cultures, and can help us find new ways to solve old problems. That’s curation we can control. Then there are curation opportunities we can’t control.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn says of his time in Stalin’s corrective labor camps, “Bless you, prison!” An experience that nearly broke this man granted him a knowledge of how “a human being becomes good or evil.”
His years of forced imprisonment became fields ripe for harvest.
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Chances are you’ll never rot for a decade in a gulag. And most of your experiences won’t kill you or anyone close to you. But if you’ve at least made it to your twenty-first birthday, as Flannery O’Connor was fond of saying, then you’ll have a lifetime of material.
Don’t be afraid of the world. Or the people or circumstances you can’t control. Odd as it seems now, that junk will one day become your creative cache.
