Who Inspires the People Who Inspire Us?

I have been thinking about inspiration lately. Not the sort printed across a photograph of a sunrise or offered as a neat little sentence telling us we can achieve anything if we believe hard enough. I mean the quieter kind. The inspiration we absorb from watching another person live.

We carry something from those who came before us, add something of our own, and pass it forward to those who follow.

Sometimes the people who inspire us most are the ones whose lives we have been close enough to witness. For me, much of that inspiration comes from my children.

They are grown men now, raising children of their own and discovering, as every generation eventually does, that adulthood rarely resembles the version we imagined when we were young. Life has thrown challenges at them - some expected, others anything but - and I have watched them adapt, stumble, learn, work and continue.

They have taken parts of their past and used them as building materials for something of their own. They are raising families, creating businesses and finding their way through responsibilities that once belonged to somebody else.

And somewhere along the way, an interesting reversal occurred.

The children I once hoped to teach began teaching me.

The People Who Inspire Us — and Who Inspired Them

That thought sent me down another rabbit hole, because naturally, my mind wandered towards philosophy.

We often talk about the great thinkers as though their ideas appeared fully formed inside extraordinary minds. Plato thought this. Aristotle believed that. Nietzsche declared something wonderfully inconvenient, and generations of philosophy students have been trying to work out exactly what he meant ever since.

But none of them thought in isolation.

They read. They argued. They listened. They disagreed. They inherited ideas from people who came before them and sometimes spent enormous portions of their lives trying to prove those people wrong.

And I rather love that.

Plato was profoundly shaped by Socrates, the teacher who left us no philosophical writings of his own. Much of what we know of Socrates comes through others, particularly Plato. The questioning, the refusal to accept an easy answer, the irritating little but how do you know? sitting underneath everything, those echoes travelled forward.

Then came Aristotle, who studied with Plato for around twenty years and proceeded to take philosophy in directions his teacher might not always have approved of. Where Plato was drawn towards Forms and realities beyond the physical things before us, Aristotle paid close attention to the world itself, to living things, causes, observation, logic and how things actually behave.

Inspiration, apparently, does not require agreement.

That may be one of the things I find most interesting about it.

Centuries later, René Descartes would turn questioning inward. What can I actually know? What if my senses deceive me? What remains when I doubt everything I possibly can?

Eventually he arrives at the famous Cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am.

I have returned to Descartes many times because the question underneath his philosophy remains wonderfully unsettling. Once we begin questioning what we know, where exactly do we stop?

Then there is Immanuel Kant, who famously credited David Hume with interrupting his philosophical certainty - awakening him, as Kant put it, from his “dogmatic slumber.”

Rousseau also affected him deeply, particularly in the importance Kant placed upon human dignity and morality.

Imagine having your entire way of thinking disrupted because you encountered somebody else's ideas.

Actually, I don't have to imagine it.

Books have done that to me many times.

Inspiration Does Not Always Mean Agreement

And then we reach Nietzsche.

For years, I wasn't entirely sure what to do with Friedrich Nietzsche. I understood what I was reading at university - or at least enough to complete the required work - but I didn't feel particularly drawn to him.

Coming back to him later has been different.

Nietzsche encountered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer when he was young and was deeply affected by it, even though his philosophy eventually moved away from much of Schopenhauer's pessimism and denial of desire. Nietzsche also looked backwards to the ancient Greeks, particularly the pre-Socratic thinkers, finding something powerful in their willingness to confront change, struggle and existence without requiring life to be comfortable.

There is something important hiding there.

The person who inspires you does not have to be the person you agree with.

Sometimes the person who changes our thinking most profoundly is the one who gives us something to argue against.

That changes how I think about inspiration altogether.

Simone de Beauvoir developed her philosophy within the intellectual world of twentieth-century existentialism and in lifelong dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre, but reducing her ideas to Sartre's influence would miss something important. Beauvoir developed her own powerful examination of freedom, identity and the social construction of womanhood, most famously in The Second Sex.

Influence travels between people. It isn't always a straight line from teacher to student.

Sometimes it is a conversation.

Sometimes it is resistance.

Sometimes it is a question somebody leaves behind.

The Family Tree of Ideas

Even writers outside academic philosophy continue this pattern.

Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist draws from an enormous landscape of spiritual and literary traditions: alchemy, pilgrimage, mysticism, dreams, omens and the recurring human search for meaning. Reading it can lead us towards Carl Jung, and Jung can lead us towards mythology, religion, psychology and ancient symbolism.

One book opens another door.

One thinker introduces another.

And suddenly we discover that ideas have ancestors.

That may be why philosophy continues to fascinate me. I don't need a philosopher to give me an answer. Quite often, I would prefer they didn't. Give me a question. Give me something that makes me close the book for a moment and stare out the window. Give me an idea I disagree with strongly enough that I have to work out why.

That is inspiration too.

And when I bring the thought back from philosophers and books to ordinary life, I realise the same thing happens within families.

We inherit more than physical characteristics.

We inherit stories, habits, attitudes, warnings, mistakes and ways of seeing the world. Some we carry forward. Some we alter. Some we deliberately leave behind.

My sons have undoubtedly been shaped by things I taught them. They have also been shaped by experiences I could never have prepared them for. Now they are taking all of that, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the lessons learned through experience, and deciding what they will carry into their own families.

And their children will do the same.

There is something rather beautiful about that.

We spend the early years of parenthood believing we are raising our children.

Then one day we realise we have been growing alongside them.

A Thought to Take With You

Think about someone who inspires you.

Then go one step further.

Who inspired them?

What did they survive, read, question, reject or learn before they became the person whose example eventually reached you?

And then consider one more possibility.

Someone may already be watching the way you live, struggle, change and continue, and carrying a little of that forward too.

Inspiration may be less like a lightning bolt and more like a thread.

We inherit it.

We add something of ourselves.

And then we pass it on.

Namaste

Deb xx

Thoughtful writing across life, mind, and meaning.

"If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way." - Martin Luther King