Yesterday, I took a break from my computer screen at work to pluck a strawberry from a box that was just in front of me on the desk. They had been brought in by one of my esteemed colleagues, and were accompanied by a selection of cupcakes which I had also eagerly sampled. I had so desperately craved the sugar rush I received from them, but then I felt a compulsion to be healthy, and if there was one fruit I was happy to consume with this in mind, it was the strawberry. A tender nugget of sweet and juicy wonder that captivates all who savour it – normally. Just a week before, Mum had bought strawberries at home that had perfectly matched that description, but on this occasion at work I wasn’t to be so lucky. As I reached forward and placed the scarlet delight between my lips, the smile I had formed in anticipation of its taste quickly faded from my face. This hadn’t been at all what I expected. I disposed of the stalk with a furrowed brow, before returning to my seat and carrying on with my day’s work.

Of course, the consumption of a strawberry is a fairly mundane thing, and normally it would have been met with an appropriately mundane response, like “ew, yuck!” Not this time, however. Instead, I found that my mind was instantly formulating a somewhat more exaggerated reaction to what had just occurred, and shortly afterwards I described the particular strawberry I’d eaten in my head as a “wet, mushy and tasteless globule of disappointment, which was squashed as though it had no structural integrity.” There have been better descriptions of such things, obviously, but what intrigued me the most was that on this occasion, trying to explain the situation to myself in a creative way was something that came instantly, like a natural reflex of the human body. The whole thing led me to a second thought, a question I asked myself – “could this be how writers think?” I wondered if they did this too, perhaps with anything that life threw at them as a mental exercise to keep the creative juices flowing (there’s that phrase again – isn’t it a cliché?)

I don’t know the answer for sure, but I personally might start doing it more often. It gave me the material I needed to create this post, after all! Maybe if I keep this mindset close, I’ll find that nothing in life is ever truly boring, and that with the right amount of time and careful consideration, I can enlighten myself in a small way every single day. People say that life is what we all make it – so why not try to make it something epic, even if it’s only known to us?

Mason