Idleness - Csikszentmihalvi

Robertson Davies, the Canadian author, said one of the most
important things in his life was being able to take a nap every
day after lunch for twenty minutes.  That's for two reasons. One
is that by developing a schedule that's under your control, you are
not being flogged around by life, as he puts it; you are not always
jumping to someone else's tune.  You develop your own rhythm...

The other thing is that it's during idle time that ideas have a chance
to recombine in new ways, because of we think consciously about
solving a problem or writing a book, then we are sitting there
forcing our ideas to move in a lockstep, in a straight line, and
probably what comes out is not very new or original.

For original ideas to come about, you have to to let them percolate
under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no
way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction.  So
they find their way, their random combinations that are driven by
forces we don't know about.  It's through this recombination that
something new may come up, not when we try to push them
directly.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalvi interviewed by Michael Toms in the
New Dimensions Newsletter.

with thanks to Heron Dance

~

We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many
 diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve
ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground
that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world
within...  By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives
from ourselves.

John Gardner

with thanks to Whiskey River

~

Personal Note - this is also why what I call "silent time" is
so important to me.  It doesn't have to be "meditation" but just
getting still, getting quiet, without interruption.  It seems then that
 words for a poem will rise to the surface, or an idea for something
that my mind could not "solve"...  Usually that "silent time" isn't
until the Quiet Hour, between 12 midnight and 1am  :)

MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

The Silent Self - Thomas Merton

 There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing
precisely because it is so silent: it can't be spoken.
It has to remain silent.  To articulate it, to verbalize it,
is to tamper with it, and in some way to destroy it.

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which
is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this
inner, silent self.  We live in a state of constant semi attention
to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise
of what goes on around us all the time.
This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words,
a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted;
we are not quite "thinking", not entirely responding, but we
are more or less there.

We are not fully present and not entirely absent,
not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available.

It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything
and we may in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and
resentment.  Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague 
sense that we are "part of something"...

Although we are not quite able to define what that something
is...  and probably wouldn't want to define it even if we could.

We just float along in the general noise.
Resigned and indifferent,
we share semi-consciously in the mindless mind of Muzak
and radio commercials which pass for "reality."

Thomas Merton
from Love & Living

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~ 

Photo - Mystic Meandering

This little tulip (maybe 6"tall") is growing
in a planter tub amongst the weeds - 
the "silent self" amongst the "noise." :)

Have no idea how the bulb got there!