Beginnings

Going Back to the Beginning

Thoughts have been coursing through my mind for years. Those thoughts can be welcomed or uninvited. I started writing on 3" x 5" index cards to record things I saw, such as looking down on clouds from an airline flight at an altitude of 35,000 feet flying from Maryland to Texas in the previous millennium. It was a literary snapshot of what I saw out the window on that day. I filled three 3" x 5" index card boxes before realizing trying to remember a thought all day long and then writing it down at night was not practical.

What I learned some time ago was that if I didn't write down my thoughts, they would cycle through my mind throughout the day. However, if I wrote down a thought, it stopped cycling through my consciousness and allowed me to clear my mind and think about other things. As a result, I would write my thoughts down in a notebook I kept in the top left drawer at work. At home, I had another notebook that I kept in the top drawer in the nightstand next to the bed.

It wasn't until I filled up all the notebooks I had and was not able to locate any additional notebooks of the same design, which was a top spiral bound notebook, that I started carrying a folded 8-1/2" x 11" paper in my shirt pocket to write thoughts on. The folded paper proved to be more convenient than waiting until I got to my desk or to the nightstand to write a thought down. However, a drawback to writing on paper is that it is susceptible to moisture damage. More than one thought has been lost to becoming illegible due to being too wet to read.

As I filled up a panel on that paper, I would fold up the written panel and unfold a blank panel. When the paper was filled up, I would put it in a pile to transcribe from paper to an electronic file at a later date. I currently have 26 folded pages to transcribe. Additionally there are 2 papers that I have partially transcribed and 18 notebooks to transcribe.

The rate of writing varies tremendously. I can go for days without writing a thing. It isn't that I am not thinking, it is just that I don't think I have any thoughts of significance. And other days, I will write a lot of thoughts until I have to stop to begin the work day. Writing topics can be variations of a theme and following a common thread. Or thoughts can have no obvious pattern covering a wide range of topics, which can be from emotions and relationships, to events and opinions, or the cosmos and cosmology.

I find that 3 a.m. is a great time for thinking thoughts. But, that early of a start tends to make for a long day.

When writing, I will occasionally have what I consider to be a profound thought. That profound thought is usually on a topic that I have not thought about before. Where did that thought come from? Well, it manifested in my consciousness, but where did it come from? Did it come from the well of thoughts? Or did it spring from the seed of thoughts?

One day I will spend some time thinking about that.

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What to do with these thoughts?

Having written thoughts down for years, I have a lot of thoughts scattered across several different types of media: 3" x 5" note cards, notebooks, electronic files, notebooks, sheets of paper, scraps of paper, and folded pages. My goal is to gather all those thoughts together and put them in one place so they can be read and hopefully encourage or inspire others. Encourage others to know they are not alone in this life and to realize there is an outlet where they can go to get out of their head and think about something else for a while.