I am fighting a bit of a flu bug right now and during the past week I have not been able to fall asleep as quickly as I normally do. On of the unexpected benefits of it has been many quiet hours (free from distraction) to do nothing more but let my mind wander and think.
Distractions to our thinking
Like most people, it is easy to get caught up in the non-stop pace that life brings, but there is some very real value in stepping back and devoting some time to thinking. On one hand we are always thinking. Our brains are churning away trying to solve 100 problems at once.
What I am referring to is more MACRO thinking rather than MICRO. More thinking about long-term goals, rather than short-term implementation. More thinking about things that will matter a year from now, rather than how I am going to find time to get to the meeting and make dinner tonight.
Some of the hours I have spent staring at my dark ceiling the last few nights have turned out to be tremendously fruitful. I have gotten some big-picture ideas that I never would have had I not spent an hour or so specifically thinking about them.
Our minds and brilliance
I remember hearing stories of how some the world’s greatest minds (poets, writers, artists) would regularly spend hours at a time letting their minds wander. It wasn’t laziness, in fact, if you asked them it was the source of their brilliance. Just like an eagle confined to a cage, they knew that in order to get the highest and best use from their minds they had to set if free and let it soar.
While I know they probably had distractions in their day, you can bet they were nothing like what we face today on a daily basis. But regardless of how difficult it is to set time aside for thinking, it doesn’t make it any less valuable.
God’s purpose for our minds
You know, the thing is God created our minds and while part of their purpose is for dealing with the rapid-fire problems that come up everyday, they also have a creative and far more expansive function that many of us (talking to myself here) are not taking full advantage of. I wish it wouldn’t have taken a sickness to remind me of this, but I now have a fresh determination to find ways to add more free-thinking time to my schedule.
If we could even take an hour a week to devote to thinking about some of these bigger (and more important) questions, I think we would be amazed at the results. So maybe you are a pro at this and have some practical tips to share with the rest of us, or maybe you are like me and are being reminded of the importance of it. Either way, let’s let our minds off the leash a bit more – what do you say?
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FIrst of all Bob, I hope you get to feeling better. It’s never, ever fun being sick, no matter what it may lead to.
I find that solitude is so important in a daily walk with God as well as helping focus myself on the tasks at hand. One can’t do both at the same time and too often God gets the short end of the time, which I am working on at the moment. I treasure my alone times in the morning especially while my wife is asleep. The house is quiet and I can relax and be still and spend time with God.
Believe it or not, the time I let my mind wander is during exercise. I workout at the local Y 5 days a week and I put on my headphone and even with the music going on, its time when I let my mind wander, lately, thinking of ideas for posts on my blog. It will, of course, be different for everyone but it is important to find that still, quiet time, both to spend with God and to refocus yourself.
Bob, I am feeling better today – thanks!! Yea, I intentionally didn’t mention praying, because I wanted to differentiate the two… While I think the better thing is to spend quiet time in prayer, I think we should do both! I found in my own life that I would automatically “default” to praying, never just letting my mind think…
I wonder if our culture’s over-busyness means we will produce fewer great thinkers than the generations before us did.
I hope that isn’t the case, but it seems as a society we have gone that direction!