Write, then Think

Today I told my students the truth about writing and thinking:

When you write, you think. Neurons in your brain start firing in a familiar pattern until there’s no more neural connections in that area. That’s when some students stop writing–when they run out of ideas. They believe they can only write about what they think about first.

This is exactly when you must keep writing.

When you keep writing in the face of a dead-end neural pathway, you have no choice but to write about something else. You go to another section of neural connections, then transcribe that though process on the page. Then another, and another. You keep writing about what you do know about, what you can uncover within your own mind, or about some questions you have about that which you don’t know.

Every now and then, that process of writing, then writing more, allows you to draw connections neural connections between the ideas you wrote down, pathways you didn’t previously have. And you have just learned something new, without turning to an outside source. It was within your own mind. A self-revelation, a connection, a link that might shift your perception from here on out.

So write, and keep writing. Do not think first, just write. Let your thoughts flow then let them snag, trip, scrape their knees, and flow again. In this way writing is an act of courage–it’s going where your mind hasn’t gone before, into the unknown. Into yourself.

More than Meets the Eye

Order is only possible if there is also entropy. Entropy seems to win.

Entropy, as thermodynamic holds, is always increasing. All aspects of the universe tend toward chaos, towards falling apart. Organization is seldom witnessed, let alone maintained.

If God created everything, why did God create entropy? Why do things have to fall apart?

Perhaps the only way things can ever organize is if the raw materials somehow came together in the first place. The only way for things to come together, it seems, is if there are plenty of things that fall apart, first. The Big Bang did not create the perfect conditions for Earth; it created the conditions for stars to burn and explode, then Earth took shape after enough rock floating was floating around our sun that gravity pulled it all together. Order, but first there was chaos.

We tend to justify order as a good, benevolent force and chaos as a bad, malevolent one. Perhaps that’s the way it is. Or maybe order is an evolutionary mechanism, intrinsic to the survivability of complex social species such as ours. Maybe we equate order with goodness because that’s what’s best for our survival.

Either way, whether order, chaos, organization, or entropy takes over, all are aspects of God, Who is all things. There can be no light without darkness, no order without entropy, no good without evil. Life is duality, but here we are thinking God is only the good. It’s all God, is it not?

Being a Professional

Show up, do your work, go home.

Show up on time, do your best work, go home feeling accomplished.

Show up on time so you can focus without early distractions (like email, or the mess from yesterday), do your best work because the world needs it and your company enables it, go home feeling accomplished because you did something that moved you towards the change you seek to make.

Amateurs do the work because they have to. Professionals do the work because it’s important and the world would suffer if they didn’t.

Memory

We don’t remember much from when we were babies. That part of our brain wasn’t online.

What was online, though, was the rest of our itty-bitty bodies. Babies are sensory machines. It’s only through their experiences of the world–touching, tasting, smelling, grabbing, moving, crying–that they learn, grow, and develop. But what is “learning?” How does a baby learn?

Through neuronal pathways. Every time a baby tries to crawl, its nervous system attempts the complicated physiological process known as locomotion. In the beginning it doesn’t work. But after trying and trying, the neurons attached to the muscles in the arms and legs get enough practice. Like ski tracks down a fresh bank of snow, the baby’s brain now has the deep grooves of the neuromuscular pathways necessary to crawl. And that’s basically how learning works.

A baby doesn’t make memories because its brain is busy learning how to be alive, and a baby must be entirely present, in all its senses, in order to learn. Meanwhile, its body has to pay very careful attention to its environment so it can figure out how to act against gravity, understand, communicate, move, fight, flight, think, and, eventually, grow up. The visual memories we typically think of as our imagination don’t come until later. First, our body has to learn–then remember–how to live and survive.

As we grow up in our modern, westernized society, we are less in our bodies and more in our minds. As we are less aware and sensing of our bodies, we become less present and more past and future oriented (attention moves away from the brain stem and spinal cord and to the far reaches of the prefrontal cortex, unique in size and intellectual capacity to humans). We lose ourselves in our imagination. While our imagination is real to us, it often pulls us out of the present, the now.

The way a baby comes into the world is almost the same as how the universe came into existence through the Big Bang. In the beginning, everything was one, whole, unified, present, now. Then it expanded and reality was created in less than a second. Ever since then we’ve been moving away from the oneness, the center, the origin. We’ve been soaring away, in the far stretches of the universe, a reality so unbelievable it only seems possible through a rich, divine imagination. Still we long for connection, relationships, presence, and eternity. We desire things as they were in the beginning and always have been, a world without end. A world with unlimited potential. A world where we can become whatever we want.

A world like that of a baby who is loved.

For a baby, memories are embodied so we can learn to live. For us, memories control our bodies so much that we forget to live.