Maybe you don't have to be doing something else right now. Maybe you just need to sit there and read some things and watch some things and take it all in and then reflect. I suggest watching Dr. Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture" (sample here, full version here). It will take a while. It's worth it. You can Tivo whatever else you had planned on watching tonight. When it's over, just sit there and think for a little while about whatever. And for the record, the attendant circumstances of Pausch's presentation, and the irony associated therewith (on so many levels), really have nothing to do, in my mind, with the value that can be taken from his presentation.
So where am I going with this?
The other day I read this thing about the powers of meditation and the witty quip at the end was: "If you don't have an hour in your day to meditate, then you need an hour in your day to meditate." Or something along those lines. I'm sure I butchered the quote. But the issue I'm not framing very well here is that actually thinking about things (focusing, meditating, brainstorming, mind-mapping, dreaming, imagining, etc.) seems like it is becoming such a lost art. It's being squeezed out by an almost compulsive need to be constantly doing all of these repetitive, mindless, time-filling things in a quantity over quality feeding frenzy and at the end of it all, nothing all that great has actually been accomplished. I'm going to start allocating more time to thinking and less to doing and see if the quality of the doing doesn't markedly improve.
