We tend to picture genius as an arrival — a level you finally reach, a title earned once and kept. Innocent puts it somewhere humbler and harder: “Creative genius is not a place you reach, but a state of mind you maintain.”

If it’s a state, it can be held or lost on any given day, and returned to. What it opens up is a way of seeing — a mind that can “unveil the hidden layers of meaning in life and make connections otherwise impossible to make.” That’s not a trophy on a shelf; it’s attention you keep choosing.

He came to it as an author: so much of what we want turns on the state of mind we bring to it. Genius included — not a place on a map, but a mind you keep coming back to.