Sustaining Your Passion

Murals, Museums and Meteorites

Sometimes you need a shot of inspiration to help unlock your creative energy. It’s like your brain needs a boost of oxygen. Inspiration & motivation for creative work comes in cycles. Sometimes you can write a whole article in one go. Sometimes stringing two sentences can seem like a chore.

For me, usually watching a National Geographic documentary or spending time with my family does the trick. Visiting museums is another great way for me to feel re-energized. This also turns out to be a really good family outing.

Museums, in a bid to stay relevant, are always looking to be more engaging. They are constantly tinkering and trying out new exhibits. The diversity of material covered reflects the amount of thought put into being fascinating and informative. They also have to think about the diversity in age-group and different interests they need to serve.

So the amount of creativity and love put into them is simply amazing and inspiring.

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I want to share my recent visits to two fantastic museums. Starting with The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Needless to say, Philly is a huge Ben Franklin fan and you’re greeted with his statue as soon as you enter —

The intriguing exhibits for me were obviously the space related ones. Most exhibits were interactive where you could touch or throw something and watch things happen. They covered a range of concepts like gravity, distances in space and one exhibit even had an ancient meteorite on display.

For casual observers, there can be an overwhelming amount of information to parse through. But museums know how to present information in a fun and accessible way. For example, to show differences in wavelengths of Light, from Infrared to Ultraviolet, this museum had you press a button that sent those waves across colorful tubes. Differences in color would showcase the differences in wavelengths.

Just a simple and cool way to show how our world works!

The Philly museum went one step further to keep the kiddos entertained — there was a whole exhibit built using Lego pieces. First, there were art pieces developed by a renowned artist using only Lego. Then there was a whole area for kids to build whatever they wanted using Legos and their own imagination. The creativity was fun to see!

There were other exhibits that covered airplane development and aeronautics history. Look forward to going back and exploring the museum soon.

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The second museum I recently visited was the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. This is one of the premier museums in the country.

Starting with a totally amazing mural of space age —

There were other space related exhibits covering our journey to the Moon. Starting with recovered Saturn V rocket pieces that came down during Apollo 11 launch and the capsule that brought the astronauts back to Earth. There was also a cross-section of rocket engines cleverly placed above us to look like we were standing directly under a rocket. Finally, there was some more history about the space race and Soviet contributions to it.

As the museum name implied, there was a whole section dedicated to planes — old, new, and imaginary ones (X-wing from Star Wars).

This was just a tiny sliver of what Museums have to offer. These museums not only look at the past, they also present what’s coming next.

Like one of the museums had an exhibit where you could build a Mars rover by selecting things like number & types of tires. It would then run a simulator to show how that configuration would handle the Martian terrain. It would also let you design rovers for icy-moon of Jupiter. This was a light-bulb moment for a lot of people as they realized the same rover configuration would not work on different types of surfaces. Such a great way to take people from their daily life and transport them to a whole other world!

So, if you have a local museum, I encourage you to visit it. And if you’re able to, support them in any way you can!

Would also love to know — what gets your motivation levels back up to do things you like? Please leave a comment.