I Thought I’d Already Seen It

I used to think inspiration was something I had to chase.

If I wasn’t creating, producing, solving the next problem or moving something forward, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was falling behind.

Then I went to Florence.

Nothing dramatic happened.

There was no lightning-bolt moment in front of a Renaissance painting. No cinematic epiphany in a piazza.

It was smaller than that.

Morning light catching old stone buildings. People lingering over coffee instead of carrying it somewhere. Paintings I’d known from books for years, but had never actually stood in front of.

And streets I walked more than once.

That last part got me.

I could walk down the same street and notice something the second time that I would have sworn wasn’t there the first.

A doorway. A face carved into stone. The color of a wall. Some ridiculous little architectural detail that had survived hundreds of years only to be completely ignored by me on Tuesday.

Nothing had changed.

Except, apparently, me.

The same thing happened with the paintings.

The longer I stayed, the less interested I became in immediately understanding what I was looking at.

I could just look.

And then look again.

Something about that felt strangely unfamiliar.

I spend a lot of my working life making decisions. As a designer, I’m trained to clarify, edit, organize and resolve.

But standing in Florence, I started thinking about how quickly we decide we’ve understood something.

A painting.

A place.

Maybe even ourselves.

We name it, categorize it, understand it well enough—and move on.

Painting has increasingly become the place where I resist that impulse.

I build, obscure, remove, reveal. Something starts to emerge and I have to decide whether bringing it further into focus will strengthen the painting—or explain it to death.

Sometimes the best decision is to leave the damn thing alone.

I think Florence reminded me of that.

Not that there is “always more to see.”

Something slightly different.

Some things become clearer when you stop trying to define them.

I’m still figuring out exactly what I mean by that.