When a piece feels inspired

Last night I listened to Bach’s Mass in B minor, BWV232, and the fact that someone wrote it is still unfathomable to me. Bach had a direct line to God. I say that in jest, but honestly, I find it difficult to account for that piece without some kind of inspiration that goes beyond technical ability. Certain pieces feel like they are expressing something great, and the artist is the conduit through which that divinity is expressed.

I think intent and awareness have a lot to do with it.

By intent, I mean the focusing of the mind’s eye. There’s a line from Meister Eckhart: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

Awareness is waking up to the reality within ourselves and our surroundings. It is stripping the veil from in front of the mind’s eye. If intent is a beam, awareness removes what obstructs it. Together, they allow for thoughtful implementation. What you can make depends on what you can perceive and how completely you can direct your mind toward it.

Music is the purest art form. Film is less pure, but still fascinating as both an art and a craft. Product design is the most craft-like of the three, but I think it is still subject to the rules of the arts. Intent and awareness carry through all of them, even though the implementation is different.

In directing, what I care about is shots. Placing the camera is 80% of directing to me. Where it goes, what it sees, and how one shot progresses into the next define the visual language of the film. A shot has a relationship to the shot before it and the shot after it. The progression matters as much as the individual shots.

I care much less about directing actors. Either actors are good or they aren’t. A good director can’t make a bad actor good, and a bad director can’t make a good actor act poorly. I put that under casting. The director’s main job is placing the camera and defining the visual language and shot progression. That is where intent becomes a series of concrete decisions.

In product design, those decisions have a more practical purpose, but they still demand thoughtfulness. You have to stay with a problem long enough to see it clearly. Being able to implement something quickly doesn’t tell you whether you have really understood what you are making.

The environment in which our minds develop has changed. We are used to consuming information immediately, and spending an extended period with a book, a piece of music, or a difficult idea can feel straining. On screens, the time people sustain their attention before switching has measurably shortened over the last twenty years.

Twenty years ago was already a different environment for the mind. A hundred years ago is even more of an abstraction. Could Bach even exist now, in 2026?

I honestly don’t know. But if he grew up now, with the same genes and everything else as equal as reasonably possible, I don’t think he would be able to compose the Mass in B minor. His innate ability would still be there. It would still be Bach. But I think the environment would change his brain to function around an entirely different way of processing information. The same ability would develop under different conditions.

I’m not saying shorter attention spans are bad morally. I think they completely change the way we create art and craft things. The environment shapes what we attend to and how long we can remain engaged with it, and that engagement affects what we are capable of making.

Attention and intent have a long history of producing great work. I think the depth of engagement they allow is part of what makes a piece feel inspired.