The origins of inspiration

As I often do, I wait around for an idea to present itself to me for my blog. Sometimes it begins with something small, a passing comment someone makes, a new fact I’ve learned, or a story I happen to stumble across. I gather these fragments and hold onto them, hoping that one of them might flourish into something worth writing about. And yet, more often than not, I find myself sitting and waiting, waiting for something to settle, to connect, to feel significant enough to explore and commit to writing for.

This week was no different. I found myself thinking deeply about what topic to write about, and ironically, in searching for inspiration so deliberately, I began to realise that the act of searching itself was part of the answer. And so, unintentionally, I have arrived at the idea of writing about inspiration itself - a way of reflecting on the very thing I had been trying to find, and perhaps a slick attempt to dodge writer’s block by examining its opposite.

You see, nowadays, we are taught to see inspiration as something internal - a product of a brlliant mind, shaped by our experiences, memory and our surroundings. That sudden spark we feel when a new idea comes into our minds, for which neuroscience can easily argue is simply the brain forming connections beneath our awareness. That the eureka moment is not divine, but merely cognitive.

However, the ancient world resisted this. To them, inspiration was never really a credit of their own. It was a gift divinely bestowed upon them. Take the muses: the divine figures who governed poetry, music and history. In the Iliad, Homer begins by calling the Muses - “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles…". He invites the muses to sing through him, as though he is an empty glass, and they a jug of flowing wine. Inspiration for them, arrived from above and the artist was merely its vessel.

In sharp contrast to the fruitful and gentle invocation of the Muses, the myth of Prometheus offers a far more unsettling view of where inspiration might come from. Rather than receiving a divine gift, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and delivers it to humanity; an act often understood as the origin of knowledge, creativity, and civilisation itself. Fire becomes symbolic of something greater than mere survival. It represents the spark that allows humans to create, to think, and to transform the world around them. Yet this act is not without consequence. For daring to take what was not meant for him, Prometheus is punished, bound and condemned to eternal suffering. Zeus sentences him to be chained to a rock (often said to be in the Caucasus Mountains), and every day an eagle is sent to peck at and feed on his liver. As Prometheus is cursed with immortality, his liver regenerates overnight, only for the punishment to begin again the next day. In this light, inspiration becomes something a bit more complex: not only a gift to be received, but perhaps a force that disrupts, challenges, and comes at a cost.

And so, back to the point of this post... where does inspiration come from?

Perhaps inspiration exists somewhere in between these two extremes, neither wholly bestowed nor entirely our own. At times, inspiration feels like something we receive, quietly and without force, as though we have simply made ourselves open enough for it to arrive through a slightly cracked window. Other times, it feels grappled into existence, yanked from fragments of thought, memory, and experience, carved through labour and persistence. It lingers between the ancient and the modern, between divine whisper and conscious effort. So maybe the act of writing itself is not about waiting for a spark, but recognising when it has already found us. Perhaps it is more subtle than an ethereal golden muse, maybe it takes the shape of the ideas we return to, the questions we cannot quite let go of, and the quiet urge to put them into words before they slip away once more from our grasp.

sham x