“Dad, there’s water leaking from my ceiling.” I had just spent the day doing all the dang responsible things. Now this. I have to admit, a part of me said, “Maybe it will just go away…” But, about a breath later, I realized I should probably do something. With some sleuthing, my wife and I discovered the balcony to be flooding as the rain poured down. The water, in turn, was likely pouring through a crack into my daughter’s room. There must have been a blocked drain. But it was under planks of wood that a previous owner had installed with no way to directly get to it. So, we grabbed a crowbar, head out into the pouring rain, and started pulling up planks, searching for the drain… Many people with Wandering Minds tend to depend on emergency situations. Things that kick them into action. The trouble is that everything else falls away to the side. Other important matters get lost. In some ways, a sharp deadline or an emergency can almost feel relieving. You get an “excuse” to not have to hold on to everything else because now you have a single thing to hold your focus. “This is important!” In some ways, it can even contribute to the power of a wandering mind. But the difference between one that is guided and one that isn’t is in the relaxed nature of being. Instead of a frantic letting go of other things because this one is just more important, there is a sense that the other matters are addressed. They are ready and waiting for when I am available. That relaxed state translated well into working together on the balcony. We were able to find the source, clear the muck, brainstorm adding a yearly tasks to revisit the matter, etc. More interestingly, though, working in the rain was actually kind of fun.
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Kourosh Dini, MD is a psychiatrist, productivity expert, author, and musician.
Dear Reader, Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with David Sparks and Stephen Hackett on their Mac Power Users podcast. As always, I had a lot of fun waxing eloquently, not so eloquently, and everywhere in between on matters of technology, with a momentary ode to boardgames and music. Click the button to listen to the MPU podcast episode: Listen to : "Technological Empathy" Kourosh 113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104Unsubscribe · Preferences
Dear Reader, Attention: My last email had broken links! I have fixed the link! Below is the email again. Cheers, Kourosh Many of us find ourselves embarrassed by our wandering minds. Thoughts easily scatter into daydream while our conversation partner at the party watches us drift off. I can’t tell you the number of times this has happened to me at some gathering or another. That is until I realized that my wanderings were something I could use. I could harness and engage them, and in so...
Dear Reader, Many of us find ourselves embarrassed by our wandering minds. Thoughts easily scatter into daydream while our conversation partner at the party watches us drift off. I can’t tell you the number of times this has happened to me at some gathering or another. That is until I realized that my wanderings were something I could use. I could harness and engage them, and in so doing, find deeper and better conversations. In today’s post, I talk about practicing an approach to those...