Take Time

I'm grateful to have grown up in a slower generation. On hot summer days we'd lie in the tall grass, watch the puffy clouds roll by and dream up all sorts of adventures. We'd sit on the porch at dusk and shell peas and listen to stories of days gone by.

Today there are so many things vying for our attention. Electronic gizmos. Blogs. Netflix. Facebook. I even know someone who carries not one, but two Blackberries. Really? We drive to work with the traffic reports...as if we wouldn't have known we were in a traffic jam without the radio. We text through lunch and call our friends on the way home. We eat by television and go to sleep by Mp3.

Each moment of every day is filled with... well, stuff. Loud, distracting, snippets that we can neither repeat nor understand. Things that are utterly unuseful to us and eternally intrusive into our thoughts.

As writers we should... no, we absolutely MUST take the time to reflect... in silence... you know, like, alone with our own thoughts? No music. No TV. No talk radio. Just us and our inner voice, who in my case is feeling a bit rejected right now.

It's been proven that some of the most creative thoughts pop into our heads when we're not thinking. Or at least when we aren't concentrating, brainstorming, multitasking and tweeting our genius out to the world in 140 characters or less.

STOP!

Take time to just let your thoughts wander. You and your readers will be astonished at where your random thoughts will take you. My bet is it will take us all to a much better place. I believe that call that Paradise!