For my inspiration this week, on Monday, I went over to Hufnagel Park at about 12:30 in the hopes that I would be inspired to find an idea for a paper for my Queer Studies class. After spending several days re-reading articles and trying to come up with ideas, I was at a loss and figured that there was no harm in trying to find inspiration for that while completing this assignment. So, I grabbed my MP3 player and my headphones, and I headed over to the park to people watch. Once I got there I put on some Green Day and sat back to watch. At which point I realized a rather critical thing – no one was there. The entire park was empty. Unsure whether I should just head back and try again later, I decided to sit and wait for a couple of minutes, see if anyone came. As I sat there, listening to music and doodling in a notebook, my mind started to wander a bit until, for whatever reason, that old riddle “If a tree falls in the forest and no one was around to hear it, would it make a sound?” suddenly popped into my head and got me thinking. One of the articles I had read by Judith Butler was about gender as performative, and along the lines of the tree question I started to wonder, “assuming gender is performative, if you were alone with no one around to interact with, do you still have gender?” and all of a sudden I had my paper idea. This activity relates back to inspiration for me since it reinforces that inspiration can come from anywhere and anything, even if that’s a lack of something. For days I had been trying to force an idea and trying to make connections to no avail, but by taking some time to sit back and do nothing, in that stillness was an idea. I think that in our lives we spend so much time rushing from one thing to the next, that we never stop to think that taking time to do nothing and just exist is just as important to idea creation as actively forming ideas.
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