Outsideness

Something about creative process feels annoying: a fresh idea, the second it surfaces, feels electric - there’s an immediate urge to run with it, build a project around it, defend it from anyone who might wave it off. And that urge feels right, because the idea is so fragile and mine.

It’s deceiving though: the freshness that makes the idea feel alive is the same thing that makes it brittle. The energy I’m spending defending it is the energy that should be going into letting it grow up into a robust one: the better move, slowly and reluctantly learned, is to step outside of it. Let it sit, stir it - let it survive on its own.

Drawing from interdisciplinary context, Mikhail Bakhtin had a beautiful word for this kind of stepping away: вненаходимость - outsideness. The state of being-outside-of. He used it to describe how an author perceives a character only by standing outside their consciousness, seeing them as a whole rather than from inside their fog.

I like that there’s a word for it – idea fog is real, and time and outsideness dispel it. The idea becomes slightly less mine, which is, annoyingly, exactly what makes it stronger. It’s likely universal: what survives time tends to mean something.

There’s a balancing act here, of course. Time is a great filter, but it’s a poor decision-maker: sometimes an idea survives because there’s nothing else to replace it, inertia disguised as endurance is worth catching, if only that was easy.