In your heart,
keep one
still, secret spot
where dreams may go and sheltered so
may thrive and grow.
~Louise Driscoll
I've been thinking a lot lately . . . about thinking. About how the noise of our lives can inhibit deep thoughts and the processing of the circumstances in our lives. How it is so easy to hear or read an opinion online and give agreement to it, or not, without even pausing to think about it. "What are they really saying? Do I agree with some parts and not others? Or do I swallow it whole? Throw the baby out with the bathwater?"
How my own creatives gifts can be stifled if I fail to carve out some time to just be still and think. Sometimes, when my thinker gets stuck on a certain issue that I just can't seem to find the answer to, a single distraction such as going for a walk or working on a puzzle will allow the very idea I was waiting for to come out of hiding. I am convinced that there are answers to be found, ideas to surface and dreams to be birthed that can present themselves only when all external voices are silenced.
None of us will ever
accomplish anything excellent or commanding
except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
- Ralph Waldo
Emerson
A great, present-day thinker that I really admire, Lance Wallnau, related this week in a Facebook post that he often has people ask if they can purchase his notebooks. The answer is no. "They are the blank canvas upon which I capture and refine ideas from all types of sources." In the same post he mentions that the inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison, filled over 3500 notebooks with his thoughts and ideas over the course of his lifetime. The take-away here, for me, is the importance of recording those thoughts and ideas.
In the midst of a noisy family gathering with brothers and sisters, grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles and cousins, this little miss in the photo above was able to tune out all the noise, all the voices and give herself fully to the project at hand. You can almost see the wheels turning in her mind, so focused she is. I wish I was more like her, but as I am not, I will endeavor to cultivate an atmosphere conducive to generating ideas and solutions that answer the need of the moment.
Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try.
~Dr. Suess
Linking with Photo Art Thursday
A great, present-day thinker that I really admire, Lance Wallnau, related this week in a Facebook post that he often has people ask if they can purchase his notebooks. The answer is no. "They are the blank canvas upon which I capture and refine ideas from all types of sources." In the same post he mentions that the inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison, filled over 3500 notebooks with his thoughts and ideas over the course of his lifetime. The take-away here, for me, is the importance of recording those thoughts and ideas.
In the midst of a noisy family gathering with brothers and sisters, grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles and cousins, this little miss in the photo above was able to tune out all the noise, all the voices and give herself fully to the project at hand. You can almost see the wheels turning in her mind, so focused she is. I wish I was more like her, but as I am not, I will endeavor to cultivate an atmosphere conducive to generating ideas and solutions that answer the need of the moment.
Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try.
~Dr. Suess
Linking with Photo Art Thursday
