When I Think About...

Hello,

Often, when my phone reminds me to write this update, I immediately ignore it. But if I manage not to ignore the really annoying prompt, which I set up, for my own benefit(🙄), then I go straight to thinking about what I should write.

Thinking seems like the correct response after all. Our minds are our problem solvers, and so we should be using them.

But I’ve been reading ‘The Power Of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, and in the first chapter, he’s been trying to persuade me that thinking is more like a disease or an addiction. So maybe my thinking about what to write is the wrong response?

It reminds me that for our ‘beginnings’ exercises, we often use the phrase, “when I think about” followed by some kind of noun or emotion. We used to use the phrase “the thing about,” but that often sparked opinions rather than stories.

Last week, we did “When I Think About Olives.” Which, when we were doing our planning, and Lynn suggested ‘olives’, I responded that I didn’t think everyone would have a story about olives, but that I’d like to find out if I’m wrong. So we tried it.

And I was wrong! Again! 🤣

We learned that people had taken trips to specific regions of Spain and Italy just to taste the olives that are not exported. And how working double shifts in bars can be so lucrative that it’s worth enduring the only thing you get to eat are the awful olives meant for cocktails. And how one olive-eating contest when you are 8 years old can lead you to avoiding them for the rest of your life.

And I could be wrong here again, but I think that if we’d used “the thing about olives,” we’d only have discovered who liked olives and who didn’t.

Got any thoughts? Tell me on Tuesday.

Mark

xx