Inspiring Ideas

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Human minds are strange.  For instance, they often experience their best ideas when it’s difficult to write them down.  Or consider that our best work often comes just as time is running out, as if the added pressure is what produces these diamonds of thought.  Or yet again, the problem that resolved  itself just as your body’s dropping off to sleep and you’re too tired to write it down.  These kinds of things aren’t isolated incidents.  They happen all the time.  I was thinking about this because I found a broken shower memo board in the attic.  My wife gave this to me as a gift at Nashotah House.  I used to complain about having my best ideas while in the shower.  The internet and easy electronics may have existed, but they weren’t part of everyday life yet.  Besides, I prefer to write things down.  This plastic board could be mounted in the shower and had a waterproof “pen” that could work while wet.

Since minds are strange, after a while the best ideas stopped coming in the shower.  There was a way of recording them, so they shifted to other times.  These days they’re likely to come while I’m jogging.  I’m not inclined to stop and try to find some voice recording app on my phone, if I remember to take it, and I don’t jog with my pen and notebook that I otherwise keep at hand.  Since the idea is endangered, it shows up.  Sometimes it gets written down when I get home—I do keep a small notebook just inside the door—other times I see a fox or an owl and ideas vanish.  With my strange sleep schedule, I’m not inclined to arouse myself while a great idea dawns just as the theta waves start.  Generally it’s gone by morning.

For those of us who write, losing ideas is more like losing teeth than losing a hair.  It’s something substantial with fewer replacements available.  For whatever reason, ideas seem to have learned to avoid the time I’m in the shower.  At Nashotah that was generally after my morning writing session and jog, while getting ready to go to morning chapel.  These days showers tend to come after a long day at work, relaxing me before sleep.  My mind is already tired by then.  These rare ideas are almost playful at being inopportune.  If they are captured, they can be written down.  But they have to be trapped first.  As if they have minds of their own.

Thinking Thinking

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Something that’s been on my mind (anticipatory pun) lately, has been thought.  More especially, the quality of thought.  We are conscious beings, although we’re not sure what that means.  Beyond a Cartesian self-awareness.  Everyone knows what it is to have times when you’re not thinking clearly.  Or are feeling confused.  Those of us who tend to live quasi-monastically (keeping to a routine, early rising, writing and reading daily before the 9-2-5 routine) notice the ways subtle things can influence the quality of our thinking.  For me, first thing in the morning is the best time.  (Although I must confess that lately I don’t wake up with the crystalline clarity that I have for years, as if sleep is beginning to intrude on my earliest hours.)  Once I’m up and going, though, routine, you’d like to think, would provide the same results.  But it doesn’t.

Photo by Pierre Acobas on Unsplash

I’ve written before how the quality of sleep can affect the quality of awake thinking—something we’ve all known all along.  But even when I have somewhat identical nights (same quality of sleep more than one night in a row), the subtleties of difference in thought persist.  To understand this, you need to realize that I’ve been rising well before the sun for a dozen years now.  I awake to a quiet house and spend a couple, sometimes a few, hours writing and reading.  (It’s how I write my books, as well as this blog.  And my fiction.)  Even on “identical mornings” where the weather’s pretty much the same, and all other factors seem equal, the quality of thought differs.  Sometimes it depends on whether I’m writing fiction or non.  As I transition into my reading time, that can make a difference in the reading experience.  I suppose that’s one reason I value good writing.

We don’t understand consciousness.  Identity is also somewhat negotiable at times.  We’ve all known a family member or friend to act “not like themselves.”  More to the point, to think not like themselves.  We have no real way of understanding thinking itself.  I think about thinking quite a bit, and I marvel at how intensely personal it is.  We may, at our will, keep our thoughts to ourselves (and that’s a good thing, in many circumstances).  Thought, it seems to me, ought to be a very high priority in our academic pursuits.  It’s a powerful thing, capable of more than we’re even presently able to imagine.  And it can differ from day to day.  Do you suppose I wrote this after writing fiction or non?