We are soldiers in a difficult war between the tangible and abstract. Although the problems that we are trying to solve are real, our task to generate innovative solutions renders the greatest challenge our own (conventional) thoughts. I had not realized how much we were in a battlefield of ideas until last Thursday, when I looked around a room full of silent thinkers. Scott had challenged us to dare greatly, and we were all quietly delineating what goals we wanted to overcome. When I finished my task, I looked around the room and observed one friend in particular.
The contours of her body shaped determination in a powerful way. Her knees bent on a couch, supporting a laptop, which likely was detailing the challenges that she was about to face. Her hands were strumming against the keyboard. The latter reverberated in constant beats - dum, dum, dum - and her fingers, scuttling on it, reminded me of troupes meandering towards the frontline - the frontline of ideas.
The silence that she possessed captured everybody else's deep thinking. I had never before thought about fingers on a keyboard as traveling, marching soldiers, but the communal silence that we all shared, cut sharp by staccatoes of dum, dum, dum, reminded me of the beats of anxiety, gravity, and determination in a battlefield. We are walking towards - and among - a field of discombobulation and idea bombs.