Ideas are like grounders.

The other day, throwing grounders to my son in the back yard, I found myself saying again and again, "Get in front of the ball." He would stick his glove out without moving his body, and if he missed, the ball would go right past him.

"Move your body so that if you miss the ball, your body will stop it," I told him.

"But, Mom, that will hurt."

"Then catch it."

Ever notice how your mind will record a moment and play it back on repeat the rest of the day? Standing there in the spring breeze--the green of the grass and newly-leafed apple tree was so fresh it almost hurt my eyes--repeating "Get in front of it. Get in front of it. Get in front of it," I thought about catching ideas.

Ideas often come to me out of the blue. Like my son on the baseball field, I may see them coming, but I haven't been doing a good job of making sure I catch them by getting in front of them. I'm not capturing theses flashes of creativity.

How to fix this?

1. Identify and Acknowledge. 

My son needs to do this, too. I wish I could make him say, "The ball is now coming rapidly toward me; I should get ready to catch it." He has a little trouble with focus, and I think this would help.

It'd help me, too. "My mind is like a steel sieve" is one of my favorite phrases (people never get it, though). Ideas pass through like water through a leaky roof, never to be remembered: a rhyming couplet, a great headline, a pun, a collage I'd like to make, or even the perfect thing to get my husband for his birthday. If I'm not ready to capture those ideas with pencil and paper, they flit away.

But if I were to identify them, just say to myself "Self: this is An Idea," they'd stick out more. Almost as if my son, by saying to himself, "The ball is coming toward me," could, by so saying, cause the ball to slow down until he got his glove down, ready to catch it. This is possible: the mind truly focusing on the task at hand can cause the body to do exactly what is needed.

2. Evaluate and Decide. 

If, in the shower, or behind the wheel of my car, I were to say "Whoa, Self: this is An Idea," I could then make a conscious decision about what to do. Maybe I need to step out of the shower, or pull over, right at that moment to write it down. Maybe I need to just latch onto it and think more carefully about it for awhile. Maybe it's not such a great idea, and, like an ugly butterfly that wandered into my net, I can let it go.

"I'm going to move to the left three feet, kneel, and put my glove down." It's as easy as that. "When I get to the grocery store, before I get out of the car, I'm going to write this idea down."

3. Act...and keep acting.

"Get in front of it." Do the thing you decided to do. Write down the idea, sketch out the collage, just go on Amazon and order the damn birthday present right then.

Keep asking yourself whether you're in front of it.

I'm notorious for leaving things places, so now, when I leave a restaurant or a movie theatre, I always ask myself, "Do you have your purse?" I need to get in the habit of asking myself, "Do you have any ideas you need to write down?"

Catching the ball isn't the end.

My son caught a ball during the game the other day. Then he stood there. (Maybe he was just so surprised at making the catch that his mind blanked.)

Capturing an idea isn't the end, either. Random couplets jotted on the back of a receipt while illegally parked on the side of the road do not a poem make. We have to go back to where we put the idea and then do something with it. Get in front of it, make the catch, and then throw that idea back out into the world in its finished form.

Stephen Nakatani. "Baseball & Mitt."
Creative Commons License. Via Wikimedia Commons.