- For the longest time ever, the wheel has been rolling ‘round.
- Perhaps for longer than the wheel has been around, humans have lugged around their stuff.
- Going from one dwelling to another, whether to set out Kerouc-style to “find one’s fortune” out west, or just take a vacation, we’ve boxed up our belongings and brought them with us.
- We’ve lugged stuff around. I guess that’s why we call those box-like things into which we’ve tossed them “luggage”, yeah?
- I guess..
- And what continues to amaze me or maybe now it’s just at the point of being a useful object lesson to deploy from time to time, is how long it took for that wheel and that luggage to come together and become the nearly ubiquitous “wheels on luggage.”
- It’s truly worth remarking on, particularly because it seems so obvious in hindsight that the two things belonged together.
- But, like..do we really get why it took so long to put wheels on luggage? I mean..it wasn’t until the 80s by some reckonings that the resistance to it sorta..broke through and started its trajectory towards cultural ubiquity.
- All sorts of fascinating reasons and anecdotal case studies describe the reluctance and the necessary conditions. Things like affordable commercial airline travel, or even the ubiquity of leisure travel would be necessary.
- But I’m less interested in the business case study type of thing.
- I’m more interested in how one can set out to do something that today seems so incredibly obvious, but was also once ridiculous and nonsense.
- By some accounts, it was an artist named Alfred Krupa who slapped wheels on luggage, presumably to cart around his art supplies.
- Of course if you know me, I’m much less interested in the question of who/what was first to do what and when.
- I want to appreciate and learn how to foster a highly intuitive, productively creative consciousness that can look at the world a bit askew, luxuriate in the nonsense seen, and find the paths that lead thence to beautiful, unanticipated, unexpected outcomes.
- How can we foster an imagination of that sort? One that would put wheels on luggage?
- “Get those wheels off of that luggage Krupa. Act your age, for goodness’ sake..”
- Some types of psyches can’t help but turn some peculiar vision of nonsense into something meaningful. The intuition leads. The rational waits patiently — or maybe tortures the intuition, goading it to make some sense.
- It’s not surprising to me that someone with the consciousness of an artist — high intuitive, willing to do something ‘zany’ (i.e. unanticipated, unexpected, startling, peculiar, odd, different, etc) may have been suited to doing something as crazy as putting wheels on luggage at a time when such was not done.
- To resist rational, reasonable, sensical norms, well — that’s hard. It hurts. There are any number of land mines along the way.
- Risking lack of acceptance — of ideas, the fruits of one’s intuition and imagination. That can hurt.
- Vulnerability. Sharing an intuition or imagination is never risk-free and can lead to all kinds of nastiness.
- Fear of, or the invocation of embarrassment, can take someone fully out of the creative game.
- Embrace the wheels finding their luggage. Let your imagination — your intuition — lead you unexpected places.
- Your intuition and imagination are showing you in their own peculiar, unstructured, psychedelic way what wheels on luggage feels like, which is different from all the other rational decision-making criteria that are otherwise fetishized by the step-wise procedures for design and creativity.
- Learn how to attach yourself to that imagination.
- Exercise it.
- Become friends with it.
- Give it a place, and a time to chase a ball and play.
- Don’t reason with it. Don’t rationalize it.
- Build. Create. Explore.
- Make worlds that make sense to themselves, and forget for that play time if they make sense otherwise.
- Ignore your imagination and your creative soul will be put in peril.
- Our imagination is how we create new possible near future worlds.