Can time alone help you think clearly?
After a meeting about a mural for the local library, the person designing it has plenty of ideas and no clear picture.
The children want birds and planets. The librarian wants the wall to invite people into books. Several residents want it to show something of the neighbourhood’s history. Each suggestion makes sense when someone explains it. Put together, they seem to ask for several different murals.
The designer needs time alone with the drawings. Quiet gives them a chance to consider how the ideas relate, without having to respond to the next suggestion. That is one way time alone can help you think clearly: it gives your own understanding time to develop.
A Spark from Vicissitudes of Life
Sometimes all you need to make sense of things is to just be alone. I truly was alone, as no one understood me.
At home, the designer spreads the drawings across a table. The birds and planets first looked like unrelated requests. Looking again, they notice that both take the viewer beyond an ordinary street. That fits the librarian’s wish to make reading feel inviting. A book could open into a landscape containing both.
The historical material still needs thought. Adding portraits along the bottom would include it, but the portraits would have little to do with the rest of the picture. The designer leaves a space rather than forcing everything into the first sketch.
Alone, they can let that difficulty remain for a while. In the meeting, an unfinished thought invited an immediate response. Now there is time to see why one part works and another does not.
In “The lone visionary”, Innocent describes a more painful kind of aloneness. People around him do not understand his ambitions, and that lack of connection hurts. He also finds that their opinions become less able to deter him when he recognises that they do not share his path.
There is something difficult in that combination. You may want another person to understand what you are trying to do and still need to think without their agreement. Waiting until every part of an idea makes sense to someone else can leave you defending it before you have had enough room to understand it yourself.
For the designer, an afternoon apart allows a possibility to take shape before it has to answer everyone’s concerns. That time would feel different if there were nobody willing to look at the result. Having space to think and having someone to share it with can both matter.
Quiet also has limits. If the designer keeps turning the same drawings over without seeing anything new, more time at the table may not help. They might need to revisit the wall, ask a resident about one of the old photographs or find out which books the children love. Some parts of the problem require something they do not yet know.
The sketch eventually gives the designer a clearer question to bring back. The book, birds and planets now belong together. Could a story from the neighbourhood become part of that imagined landscape, rather than sit separately underneath it?
They take the unfinished drawing to the next meeting. It is clear enough for others to see what they are trying to do, with enough still open for the conversation to help.
Related lessons
AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
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