New Shoots & Your Creative Woodland

Imagine that our creative life is like a woodland: established ideas and patterns are the trees that dominate the landscape, and new ideas are the seedlings and saplings on the woodland floor.

It’s all too easy to overlook the new shoots and seedlings that are growing beneath our feet.

It’s much easier to focus on the big things in our work, those trees, and to ignore those small ideas that at the moment don’t bear fruit, those little seedlings.

This is a photo of a Bracken shoot in woodland near my house

I want to take the woodland metaphor to the next level.

What if our woodland is actually made up of small apple trees, no taller than a horse?

Amid the leaves of the woodland floor, you spot a seedling a little over a foot high.

You could ignore this seedling, watch as it gets overgrown by weeds, choosing instead to focus on the apples.

Or you could tend to this little plant because if you did give that little seedling your care and attention it would grow into a giant redwood that soars way above those little apple trees.

That's the thing with ideas, you never know what might come of them.

Don’t just tend to your current biggest projects, give some love to those little ideas that bring you excitement.

You never know, they might become the biggest thing you have ever done.

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