Forcing the mind vs. letting it wander around

2 am. Coming back from a late night walk. Still feeling the cold relaxing wind in my hair.

I was taking a walk because I wanted to think clearly. Something my room didn’t provide.

If you spend 80% of your day in your room, meaning you sleep there, you eat, you read and learn and work in this room, it can get really tough to become creative in this same atmosphere.

So I was trying to flip on the creativity switch by taking a walk. This is usually the best thing to do. Or put in other terms the best ideas are the ones that come to me naturally when being outside having a nice walk.

Maybe accompanied by somebody that’s able to hold up conversation about worthy subjects. People that deleted “The weather is great today, huh?” from their vocabulary.

Anyways I was looking for inspiration to come up with something I could write about.

Since I’m still in the habit building phase I want to use the momentum I have built up and stay consisted so that writing daily just becomes a part of my nature.

Like Warren Buffet says,

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt, until they are too strong to be broken.

But I think this was the problem.

See I was almost forcing my mind to be creative instead of letting it wander around and bring me those good thoughts.

Usually when I’m out for a walk I come back home from university or the gym or something.

It’s not me actively seeking for golden nuggets.

However, there are times it is quite useful to actively seek out nature for thinking and going inside one’s mind.
But this was different and my mind didn’t like the idea at all.

So instead of coming up with some amazing thoughts it was just filled with random stuff.

It was literally mind full vs. mindful.

I tried a different approach.

See I strongly believe in the beginner’s mindset. Or a curious mind. Rather the mind of a child. A beginner should have the mind of a child, that’s the right way. Let me explain.

When a child first sets out on his journey of becoming a capable human (no statistics on the success rate for now) it doesn’t care what other people think or how often it fails.

Nobody laughs at a child for not being able to do certain things. Hah imagine for a second how messed up it would be to just stand in public and laugh at children when they do stupid things. Not a gentle smile that says how cute, I must have been the same way, but genuinely making fun of the child. That would be ludicrous. Ridiculous.

Children are supposed to learn. They are curious creatures and that’s exactly the way a beginner should approach his learning.

Meaning I tried to find questions that have been left unanswered for me and see if I could come up with some thoughts about it.

After all, my two cents on different aspects of life sometimes seem interesting enough to me so why not share them with others.

But it proved tough. Since I want to add value and not merely use Steemit as some kind of diary, I figured I would need to put some more research and thought into all those different topics.

Leading to the final approach.

I went through the list of ideas I had already written down and decided to use this walk to expand on some of them. Start with a particular one and see where my mind drifts to.

Suddenly the ideas just started to pop up in all corners of my mind.

By letting the mind wander around in the first place I had come up with them.

Now it was time to focus some cognitive power on them and pursue the thought process.

Whereas in the beginning the initiating spark comes at random most of the times, at one point you need to concentrate your mind and focus on the specific thoughts.

This way I can get into a state of flow where my brain connects different thoughts and builds a big picture that I can then communicate as a story. Not to say that it’s perfect, I’m still just starting out and will probably look back in a couple months to laugh at what I produced.

But, Beginners mindset!

Once in the flow I try not to interrupt it until I can no longer focus.

It is like a plane. Sure you can get to your destination with a couple stops but it is way faster if you go direct without too much interruption.

Just thought I would share this little experience with you. Back to creating more content.

Stay curious!