Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 80
In last week’s episode I share stories about ‘Farmyard Animals I have Loved’—a favorite book of mine as a boy was Ernest Thompson Seton’s ‘Wild Animals I have Known’, so the title was a bit of homage.
Let’s revisit the riff I did on my goats and their rumination.
I have used the verb ruminating in my creative life as a metaphor for a very positive productive process: giving the thought or idea a second and third consideration, exposing it to a challenge, turning it inside out, so that I improve my understanding.
Today I discovered, to my surprise, that’s not how the psychiatric profession uses the term. They use it to describe repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings.
My first impression of the word was as a defining biological benefit for certain hoofed mammals that have a foregut in their digestive systems where the vegetation they swallow is fermented to be most effectively digested. They regurgitate the ‘cud’ and chew it again, breaking it down more completely then swallow it for digestion. Biologists call that act, chewing the cud, rumination.
Call this process by whatever name you choose but be sure to take the first step my goats taught me. Ingest, sample, find new ideas and fresh thoughts to enrich your rumination.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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