I have nothing against raisins. I like them. They’re wonderful in a number of things such as granola, salads, and oatmeal raisin cookies. They aren’t nearly as delicious when they’ve turned rock hard due to neglect. They’re a bit like ideas left to shrivel and die. They no longer serve any purpose. What once were plump grapes have been reduced, not to still-good raisins, but to pellets one could throw at the blue jay that terrorizes the backyard.
Annie Dillard has a different way of saying it; she says ideas stored for later use turn to ash. A person returns to the safe where he or she has stored them, and nothing remains, not even a scrap of paper to hint at why the idea was important in the first place. The ideas, then, have to be used as they come or as quickly as possible. If they aren’t, they turn to ash. They shrivel, and it’s not only they that shrivel; it’s all the other, yet-unthought ideas, too.
Why is that? It’s simple. Ideas multiply as they are acted upon. They disappear as they are not. It’s in the act of creation, of following through with an idea, that other ideas start to come.
This idea that ideas are like raisins? Discovered while on a morning run thinking about who knows what. Morning runs are devoted to ideas I’m pondering, events that are occurring, conversations I’m having, and simple reflection. Those things blend together, causing more ideas to come. As they do, they appear very much like grapes still on the vine – full of promise but perhaps not yet ready to be picked. They require a bit more tending, and, as they are tended to, some will become and be kept as grapes; others will be turned to wine; and still others will be preserved as raisins because raisins do have a purpose as long as they are not left to shrivel into a rock-hard and unusable state (excepting, of course, pellets for the blue jay).
Image: Mariam (CC BY NC 2.0)