Profound Silence
How often do you give yourself the opportunity for profound silence? Do you spend most of your idle moments futzing around with your phone or checking your e-mail? Do you hate silence so much that you attempt to get your headphones into your ears to crank up your iPod as soon as you leave work or class? Do you keep the television or computer blaring while you're doing chores to keep yourself occupied? If you fit any of those descriptions, you may be in the need of a healthy dose of silence.
What can you get from actual silence? It's depends on what you use that time to think about. If you use it to worry about life and all the issues you have, silence can be dreadful. Here's how to avoid that and to make sure that you can use profound silence to your benefit. Before you are about to enter into a period of silence ask yourself a question or two that you could really use the answer to. The brain works like a machine to answer questions of this nature. Perhaps you can ask yourself the question, "How should I move forward on this writing project?" or "What can I do to earn a little bit more income?" or even "What are some ways I can be more productive?" You'll be astounded to find better answers to these questions that you ever could have received when you're bombarded by countless outside stimuli.
The brain is a funny device sometimes. It needs focus to do its best work and in the presence of silence it can be a juggernaut. Combine that with the right questions and you'll start making some major progress in the areas of your life you've been trying to avoid with music or television. I'm a big fan of giving myself some profound silence in the morning since I'm at my freshest at that time. Sometimes I close my eyes to add a little more concentration. I focus on what's going on within myself and nothing else.
You may be thinking to yourself that this sounds a little hippy-dippy. To a certain extent it is, but if you give yourself a little bit of silence each day, you'll come up with some amazing ideas. Thomas Edison used to sit in a basement for hours at a time asking the universe at large to send ideas his way. Not surprisingly, he received a lot of them. Why not take a page from the book of the greatest inventor and idea generator of our time? If you want to figure out how to improve your life or how to get more out of it, try a little profound silence on for size.
Done with Profound Silence? Go back to Personal Time Management.
