On this Sunday morning, the muse is gently whispering in my ear. I dare not ignore her (she doesn't like that...). She says quietly that it doesn't matter that probably nobody cares what's on my mind. She says it is more important to write it than evaluate it.
This is the weekend. Weekend days dish up precious time to me. Weekend days are no longer about kids' activities - the kids are grown up now. It's not about camping, or mini-vacations. Weekend days are about the opportunity to turn down the weekday volume. And, amazingly, when the day-to-day volume is turned down, I find there are other tunes playing under there.
How to turn down the volume? For me, it's reading - books, local newspapers, the business press, trade journals, the cereal box. Like cable TV, a mind has multiple channels - and I discovered reading doesn't take up all my channels. Those channels unused in reading are active in their own right. They are carrying the tunes playing beneath the surface.
It's funny. I'll be cruising along on something I want to read, and suddenly, I have the answer to a lingering question or stubborn problem that I wasn't thinking about -I was just reading the newspaper! This backchannel, subsurface thinking is how, for me, problems get solved, situations get analyzed, business ideas are born.
Today, this morning, it was the Wall Street Journal. The backchannel idea? How to develop a flooring product that incorporates a special "green" technology that everybody wants, but nobody provides.
Sorry, that's all you get.
But you can be sure I'll renew my Wall Street Journal subscription. Maybe I'll head down to the library for a new book, so I can get some more great flooring ideas.
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