reflection – neumatikos

Kevin DeYoung has a nice article up on why you should think before you post. I thought it was helpful.

This is actually why I don’t blog much anymore.

First, there are too many people that I feel obliged not to speak poorly of in public. I don’t want to reflect poorly on my wife, my kids, my extended family… Worst of all, due to my job, I don’t want to reflect poorly on the United States Government. Do you have any idea how difficult that is?

But secondly, I want to say things that are worth reading. Less flippant, rather than more. I don’t want to say something that somebody else has already said, unless I can say it even better. I don’t want to say anything better left unsaid. I don’t want to say anything important that hasn’t been sufficiently thought through.

Currently, I find that I have plenty of time for shallow and summary reading, plenty of time to go, “huh!”, but not much time for thorough reflection. So I find that I have plenty to share from other people, but not much to say of my own. That’s not because I don’t have much to say, but I don’t have the time to say it in the way that I would like.

As a result, the blog often gets left untended. Facebook and Twitter become my friends. Facebook has much better link sharing, for instance. And for a time, that may be okay.

A regular routine.
Getting up at the same time; going to bed at the same time; having the same sorts of events each day take up roughly the same portions of the day… Things I do repeatedly, I get better at. The better I am at something, the more mind space I have to improvise and work on other projects.
Free time.
Somebody a bit more snobbish might call this “quiet time.” Either way, it’s not incongruous with the above point. It’s the purpose for it. I want a regular schedule so I can block big open spaces to sit and think. The key is the biggest blocks possible. A two hour block is twice as good as two 1-hour blocks, which would be still better than 4 ½-hour blocks. Every chaotic experience requires a certain margin of time before I’m able to operate smoothly again. This cuts into the free time that I have available on paper.
Plenty of time to read, reflect, and write.
As before, this is the whole purpose of the point above. I can always squeeze a little reading into the crevices in my schedule, but reflection and writing require nice big blocks. And it’s only when I’m ready to write that I first begin to notice that I’m becoming happy. It’s the foundational joy of an ordered mind.
Prayer. Continue reading “Things that make me happy”