Ideas

Ideas are foundational.  We build our futures on them.  Our relationships with ideas is an essential part of who we are, as compared to other people.  There are so many ways people deal with ideas.  Here are only a few:

  Some people collect ideas.  It's like they have glass cases or shelves of them.  Row upon row.  They love to get them out and show them to people.  Old ideas, new ideas.  Sensible ones, odd ones.  Quaint, outmoded ones they kinda miss.  Ones they are proud of the age of, and others they are proud of the exoticness or unorthodoxy of.  Ideas they have names for, little labels.  These people are always looking to find ideas they don't have in their collection, and as soon as they scent one, they need to try to label and categorize it so they know what to do with it, and so they can be certain they won't have "doubles" of it.

  Some people sell ideas.  They know how to package them up so people are most likely to accept them.  They put them into little catchphrases, slogans, sayings or jingles that can go on colourful wristbands, bumper stickers, t-shirts, billboards, fridge magnets and Facebook statuses.  They can have people all over the world buying into an idea, even without quite thinking about it.

  Some people teach ideas.  Old ideas, usually.  They plumb the depths of an idea, they trace the roots from whence it sprang, the effect it had when it first shot up, and what happened next.  They can do PowerPoint about an idea.  They can do an hour-long talk on it, but would want to talk much longer.  They can write books about an idea.  Normally they have one or two about which they are experts, because they are going for depth.  They often aren't much interested in more than a couple, but they're always looking for someone who might listen to them talk about their favourite idea.

  Some people support, follow or fight for ideas.  They start arguments, having identified the enemy ideas that they feel will threaten their mother idea.  They define their identities very much in terms of how they spend their time and hearts and minds in fighting a war intended to get (or keep) their chosen pet ideas on the top of the idea heap.  They don't like people having contradictory ideas in their heads, and they don't like anyone not being blindly, fiercely loyal to their idea, keeping it in a special place of honour.   They didn't think of these ideas of course, but they feel the ideas they support "just make sense."  In fact, supporting these ideas helps them feel like their world makes sense.

  Some people challenge ideas.  They engage and enrage the people who support and fight for ideas, because these people do not respect the Man of One Idea. They feel that ideas should flow and change and grow. So they knock over the carefully constructed edifices built to defend or revere or propagate ideas.  They themselves are often hard to catch supporting or holding any specific idea.  They are delighted to find anyone who is willing to have his or her ideas dismantled.

  And some of us, God help us, seem to have been designed by God Himself to do something altogether less explicable to most people we encounter: we have ideas.  All day long.  About anything and everything. About things we know about and things we don't.  About things that relate to us and things that do not.  And our ideas certainly aren't all sensible or good.  But they never stop.  They pour into us in a never-ending torrent and if we let them slip past in the course of an hour, we just know that we might miss a good one.  We have to choose which ones to try. From one year to the next, we seem to be found trying out completely new, and sometimes completely contradictory ideas.

  And some people don't like this one bit.  Every group claims to be looking for ideas.  Most groups do not like the people who have too many of them.