On Staring Into the Mid-Space & Other Thoughts on Time

If you love life, don’t waste time, because time is what life is made of.

– Ben Franklin

Don’t you love it when life keeps delivering up the same message to you, in different forms, until you get it?

The lesson on the value of reflective, creative time has been in every field I’ve been in, but it is still one I forget.

As an econ student, it was called ‘Research and Development’ – or R&D. It was the single biggest variable in the equation to help a company or a nation grow. New creation, innovative ideas (hello, Apple), and new products are behind this R&D number. Investing time for creativity helps things grow.

As a finance business person, it was in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (a great book for anyone), in one of the habits called ‘Sharpening the Saw’. The thing about doing a task, such as cutting down a tree, is that sometimes just hacking away and doing it isn’t very productive. Sometimes you need to take a minute and sharpen your saw (i.e. educate yourself, take care of yourself, build up your skills) in order to really be efficient at a task. We looove to feel productive, don’t we?  It feels good to be busy busy busy, and we forget that in order to take one step forward we have to take two steps back at times. We have to plan time in our schedules to reflect, read, learn, grow, improve our skill set, learn how to create something new, something better. Investing time for learning helps us grow.

As a philosophy grad student, it was in a course called ‘Insight’. We read a huge book of the same title by a philosopher named Lonergan, and in it he was taking a long look and how we come to ‘know’ anything. And it turns out, there is a model we can follow. We have experiences, those experiences generate questions, then we take time to reflect on those experiences and questions, and then we have an insight, or come to higher knowledge. Investing time to reflect helps us grow.

As a mother, it was in a talk given by Anna Quinlan.  Of all of her messages the one that resonated with me the most was that she became a writer because she got to stare off into the mid-space as a child. To look out the window and think. She wasn’t overly scheduled, rushing to the next activity. She was dreaming and reflecting and wondering. That was my childhood too, and that is why I don’t like to over-schedule my kids. Sometimes staring out the window helps us grow.

As I sat down and set my writing goals the other day, something was nagging me about what I had written down. I had scheduled the hours I wanted to spend on various projects every week. And this morning it hit me – I haven’t budgeted in time for that reflection, sharpening my saw, reading the good fiction that will help propel my own, the photography lessons I should do to improve my food blog photos, read the writing books I so badly want to finish. The stuff that makes me wiser and better when I sit down to do my work. Will I write less if I take time to do this? I don’t think so. I think I’ll be ready to work sharper, with better quality as the result. I need to invest time to make things grow.

The author of the Hunger Games said the idea came to her while she was watching TV, switching between Survivor and news footage of the conflict in the middle east. She was relaxing, reflecting, staring at the TV. Watson & Crick credit the idea of the double-helix structure of DNA, which they had long been trying to understand, to a moment when Watson was peering into the fridge, looking for a snack, and the image popped in his head. Good ideas come when we have time to just be, to just stare – at the TV, or the fridge, or whatever the mid-space looks like to you.

So this year, I am going to make sure I have some R&R&D – reflecting, relaxing and dreaming – in my personal equation. Because of all my goals, growing – as a writer, mother, sister, friend – is at the top of the list.