Charmin bathroom in Times Square
As a child, my brother was fascinated with bathrooms. Anytime we were in a new place (restaurant, neighbor’s house, 7-11) he’d tell us he had to “go potty” even if he has just used it at the last location about 5 minutes ago. This was, to my dad who had to accompany him, a pain in the you-know-what, but as he grew older and was able to take bathroom breaks on his own, he would disappear more and more.
What we later found out what happening was that he didn’t have to use the bathroom, he just wanted to see what it was like. He would enter, take a lap and exit. I would have had the same reaction had I seen a 9 year old strolling around the men’s room: pervert. What he was really doing though, wasn’t just seeing the bathroom, but absorbing the elements of the bathroom and tucking them away in his brain for use later.
That “later” would come about 10 years later when my parents decided to redo their two upstairs bathrooms. He set to work with astounding gusto considering he had never renovated anything. The bathroom came out fantastic, and well beyond our expectations for him.
The lesson is that inspiration doesn’t always come to us, sometimes we need to go get it. And the more often we seek out our muse, the more often it seeks us out. By exploring our environments on a daily basis, we absorb different elements and tuck them away for later use. It’s the simmering of these elements in our unconscious overtime that produces the constant muse. So go, explore a bathroom or two and flush out your muse.
