The Bloganuary Day 6 prompt is ‘Who is someone who inspires you and why?’, which is a pair of questions I find really surprisingly hard to answer.
Again, as with yesterday I think there are two categories of people that you could pick from: people you know (parents, family etc) and people you don’t. I find the idea of picking a person I know a little… cheesy I guess. And all the people I don’t know, well, then you don’t know them. Lots of people named as inspirational appear in many other stories that show them in a less-than-flattering light — Stephen Hawking, for example, was known to aim at people on the pavement in his wheelchair.
What does it mean to be inspired, anyway? The Merriam-Webster definition of ‘inspiration‘ has several components, but there’s a thread of it being ‘a thing that makes you want to create or do something’. There’s an interesting article on HBR about ‘Why inspiration matters‘, which looks at the psychologists’ viewpoint and again, that specifies that inspiration is both motivation and actually doing something about that motivation. The doing is an important part of inspiration, it’s not enough to simply admire.
That article reports that there are many positive outcomes to being inspired too, so I should try to be more often — although it does also point out that the best you can do is set up the optimal conditions for inspiration, it won’t be forced.
Anyway, with that definition in mind, I guess I’ll pick Natalie Chanin who founded Alabama Chanin, with its School of Making. Her approach to ‘slow fashion’, made primarily from t-shirt material and hand stitched, has inspired me to recycle and remake t-shirts that would otherwise have gone to waste, and her books legitimised hand sewing for me in so many ways. I’ve mended things, remade things, made things from scratch and decorated things (see unblogged pictures below).
I think that fits the definition of inspiration nicely.
(I also admire her work with the local community, and her ability to simultaneously provide a high-end, eye-wateringly expensive clothing line and the tools to make it yourself for the rest of us! But those are things I haven’t done anything with, so it is just admiration…)
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