— but I do also think there’s something to approaching one’s window shopping from a place of inspiration vs. one of looking for inspiration.

Many more things are liable to please your eye when you’re already in that I-love-everything mindset. Inspiration can affix to your face a pair of rose-colored glasses. One potential downfall could be that if you pull the trigger when you’re love-drunk, you might end up with something you regret later but the way I see it and have experienced it, your aperture broadens when you’re under the spell of your own brand of creative genius. Your confidence is greater, your risk threshold higher. The definition of what defines “you” according to you feels more amorphous, like there’s less ego attached to it, than in times when you’re searching and searching. The lulls between the strikes come with a bit of rigidity.

What’s interesting to me about this relative phenomenon is that when you push yourself to pursue the inspiration, to act on it (whatever that means — make your art as it were), the quality of the product you’re left with is often not that different from what you make when you’re in the neutral zone, or even feeling kind of uninspired.

It’s you who is different when you can feel the rush of rosy expansion streaming down and around your bones. And that change is all about mindset, which is entirely in your control. One day’s stupid mistake in a plate is another’s delicious accident.

The Cereal Aisle, by Leandra Medine Cohen