Inconvenient Epiphanies
Do you run your mind like you run your browser? Many tabs, all restoring on reopen?
Do you ever have those moments where you have a realisation: the perfect thing to say, the perfect way forward, a solution to a problem you’ve been battling with?
And do you find that they always come at the most inconvenient moment?
In the shower. Waking from a nap. Driving. The moment when you’re too slow to reach for paper, or your perfectionism kicks in and nothing you write sounds quite right. By the time you sit down to capture it properly, the words have changed. The insight has flattened.
I think of it as a firefly. Brief, luminous, and gone before you can hold it. You try to track where it was, but by the time you see it again, it’s somewhere else entirely. The same words never come out twice. It’s a moment of inspiration: I would even dare to say a moment of something like divine intervention. And then it’s gone.
The tabs that crowd out the light
A lot of the tabs we have open are mundane. They’re not going to change anybody’s world. They’re ordinary, but necessary, which is fine. But because there is so much of that open, it crowds out access to the moments that are truly valuable: the moments where you are briefly in awe of your own creative power, almost as if it wasn’t even your own.
Julia Cameron wrote about this in The Artist’s Way. Her practice of morning pages, capturing the raw stream of consciousness first thing in the morning, is built on the same instinct: clear the noise to let the signal through. There is even a book named for this idea. Signal and noise. The signal exists. It’s just drowning amongst all the noise.
The ancient wisdom about presence, beginner’s mind, stillness; we know these things. We dedicate a tiny fraction of our time to them. The result is that we are always trying to produce the effect. The epiphanies won’t be “produced”. They arrive at the least convenient moment, when you can’t reach for the paper.
What changed
I’ve been evolving the way I use AI models. Not as something that produces answers, but as something that captures moments; and then helps develop them.
When I’m driving and a thought arrives, I speak it aloud. When I wake from a nap with something vivid and half-formed, I talk through it before it fades. The AI doesn’t tell me where to go with it – because I have trained my models well 😉. It reflects it back, asks the next question, helps me follow the thread before that moment of clarity vanishes like the firefly in the dark.
Speaking bypasses the perfectionism filter in a way that writing doesn’t. I’m not composing. I’m flowing. And then I can reflect on what I actually said, shape it, push into it differently. The externalisation is the thing: not the AI’s response, but the act of getting it out of my head and into a form I can look at.
Through this kind of iterative, exploratory process, I’ve been able to capture thoughts and possible ways forward that previously would simply have dissolved. Work that I am genuinely proud of has emerged from it.
On authorship
I’ve moved past the uncertainty about who deserves credit for this kind of work. I am the driver. I bring the topic, the direction, the thinking, the discomfort when something doesn’t resonate. The AI is a tool: a capable one, but a tool nonetheless.
When you publish a blog post, you don’t credit the laptop. But you did use the laptop. That’s fine. This is the same thing, only the tool is more interesting and the collaboration more visible. I’ve made peace with naming it.
The point is capture
In fact, while I was speaking earlier, I had another thought… and then lost it, mid-sentence, while describing this exact problem. That’s what we’re working with. That’s the thing worth sharing and discussing.
The firefly moments are real. The question is whether you can hold the light long enough to understand what you’re seeing.
