My friend started her own blog, "Where's my watch?". She is writing about her life, her thoughts and her career. I email my blog to about 70 people daily. Mind you, emailing to them is not the same as their reading my post. Reading my post is not the same as them enjoying it or being inspired or aided in any way by it.
I asked her why she writes and her answer reminded me of my own thoughts. Karen Maezen Miller, a Zen teacher, posted a comment the other day from George Orwell, "seeing what is right in front of you takes unremitting effort." Maybe, maybe not. If you think you know what is right in front of you, you might not notice some detail that seems unimportant. I am still roaming around in ideas of attending and noticing, as well as thinking about mind wandering. I have read lots of books about attending, focusing and being aware but only one, I think, about mind-wandering, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You're Not Looking by Michael C. Corballis, a retired New Zealand psych. Professor.
The other day I was thinking about gazing and attention. I thought of a 5 pointed star.It has 5 points that jut out from the body, each made of two short sides. There are those 10 line segments. There are five points and five internal places where one side starts and another stops. Ten lines and ten points for a total of 20 items. 2^20 =1,048,576 possible selections from all those items. So, a person who wanted to look at parts of the image might very well dwell on different subsets of what is there for over a million days. That would give the person more than 2800 years of gazing targets. No wonder you select different aspects of the scene to fix on than what I choose.
That is just a simple 5 pointed star. A whole day is much more complicated that the diagram. I might see more money matters in my day than you see, or more environmental themes or note more social or meal-related themes. If I had the same day twice, I might well stumble onto different subjects on the two versions of the day.
Between my brain and my keyboard, I use different skills and neurons when I write about a theme or an idea than when I sit still and think. It is fun and valuable to run through a set of ideas, turn them into what seem to be descriptive words, and get them on a blog page.
