Shower Power
The blankness at the center of consciousness . . . remains blank. When you think hard for ideas and they will not come, you need to leave off—at which time one of your very best choices will be to enjoy a warm shower.
What’s this about?
It refers to an understanding of how your mind works.
A concentrated effort of thinking will sometimes be self-defeating as your mind refuses to respond to force. In contrast, you may gain ideas or enrich your ongoing idea when you allow yourself a certain absent-mindedness. It may occur naturally when you’re on a walk, for example, or when taking a shower or riding a train or lying in bed or washing the car. In activities like these, you are drawing only weakly on energy of intellect and all the while your mind, lazily aware, absents itself from effort and wanders easily, moving into thoughts normally unvisited, gaining access to resources normally unused. So it was that the poet A. E. Housman, taking leisurely walks in the afternoon, would usually return home with fresh verses in his head. By the same principle, Sir Walter Scott received his richest ideas just upon waking in the morning, in the interval before rising, and Sherlock Holmes received inspiration relaxing in his chair, smoking his “old and oily clay pipe . . . with the thick blue cloud-wreaths spinning up from him, and a look of infinite languor in his face.”
Yourself now in the shower, you are relaxed. You let your mind drift freely among thoughts while you feel the warm spray streaming down—while your mind gains its own mysterious energy and thought leads to thought leads to thought—and you experience ideas that would not come when you tried to coerce them sitting at your desk.
thomas@discoveringyourintelligence.com