Disclaimer: If you follow this as a prescription, you will get nowhere.
Inspiration is fleeting.
It can show up anywhere, at any time, and disappear just as quickly as it arose.
You can postpone something for months — even years — and then, out of nowhere, get the exact surge of energy needed to finally do it.
There are many reasons this happens. Sometimes you needed the deadline to loom closer, to feel the urgency breathing down your neck until you had no choice. Sometimes you needed the sting of embarrassment or the ache of shame to push you into motion.
Sometimes it’s lighter. Gentler. A sudden hit of inspiration to try something you haven’t done in years — or something you’ve never considered before. It can feel completely random, like it’s arrived from somewhere outside yourself.
And often, it doesn’t fit the persona you’ve been playing. It doesn’t fit the life you’ve carefully constructed. It might even contradict it. You might dismiss it instantly, telling yourself, That’s not me, or What would people think? You might shut the door before it’s even had a chance to breathe.
You would be wise to stop doing that.
You would be wise to nurture the fleeting inspiration.
Because inspiration is not permanent. It’s not something you can store away for later. It has a rhythm, a momentum, a half-life. Ignore it long enough and it will stop showing up.
And here’s something people rarely admit: inspiration doesn’t just disappear quietly. When you neglect it, it leaves a residue — a kind of ache. A whisper that says, You could have. You carry that around. You carry the weight of all the times you didn’t follow through. And over the years, it will turn you into someone who no longer trusts their own ideas.
Most people live with no space for inspiration. No slack in the rope. Their calendars are overfilled, their routines mechanical. Their lives move from meeting to meeting, task to task, without a single moment that isn’t already accounted for. Even if inspiration screamed in their ears, they wouldn’t have the space to follow it.
And when you have no room to act on inspiration, you become starved of it. You stop noticing the little pulls and nudges. You stop following your own curiosities. You start living entirely on obligation, with no fuel except the bare minimum needed to keep going.
It’s the worst form of self-neglect.
And even when people do notice it, they’ve learned to corrupt it. They turn their inspiration into something “useful” or “profitable” before it’s even had time to grow. They force it to serve their existing goals instead of letting it lead them somewhere unexpected.
But genuine inspiration often has no immediate utility. That’s what makes it powerful. It comes from outside your plans, outside your deadlines, outside the little system you’ve built to feel safe.
The best art is created without a deadline.
The best work is born in the space where no one is waiting and nothing is demanded.
And that’s the paradox: the moments that change you most are rarely the ones you scheduled. They happen in the gaps. The idle Tuesday night when you finally pick up the pen. The train ride where you write the first line of the book you swore you’d write 10 years ago. The unexpected conversation that shifts your entire direction.
So make room.
Not just in your schedule — in your life.
Make room for the strange, the illogical, the impractical.
Follow a curiosity even when you can’t explain it. Pick up the instrument. Learn the language. Take the class. Book the trip. Walk into the room you feel you don’t belong in. Call the person you’ve been thinking about for weeks.
Because here’s the truth: inspiration is not loyal. It doesn’t wait around. It visits those who act on it. And it remembers who ignored it last time.
When it leaves you, it leaves with a quiet promise to visit someone else instead.
You can’t summon it on command — but you can create the conditions for it to find you. Space. Openness. A willingness to be surprised by your very own nature.
And when it does find you, drop everything. Let the call go to voicemail. Let the coffee go cold. Because the moment will not wait for you to be ready — it will pass, and it will not come back in the same way.
Make room for inspiration to lead you somewhere better.
And when it knocks, for God’s sake, open the door.
Sincerely,
Milo Morrison