Hard to Start, Harder to Stop: Distractions

For English homework due tomorrow we were asked to find 5 quotes that we really connected with. They could be just something said by a person, a movie quote, a song lyric, or anything else. At first it was really difficult to think of 5, then it became difficult to think of only 5.

If you are curious here are some I came up with:

1. “Just because you find that life’s not fair it / Doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bare it”– from Naughty in Matilda the Musical
2. “When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.” -Walt Disney
3. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” -Albert Einstein
4. “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein
5. “Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better /  but because I knew you, /  I have been changed for good.”- For Good, Wicked
6. “Sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.” – Charlie Brown
7. “Ah yes, the past can hurt, but the way I see it, is that you can either run from it, or learn from it.” – Rafiki, The Lion King
8. “Never say goodbye, because saying goodbye means going away, and going away means forgetting.” -Peter Pan
9. “Promise me you’ll always remember that you’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” -Winnie the Pooh
10. “Remember who you are.” -The Lion King
11. “If there’s so much I must be / can I still just be me / the way I am?”-Kiara The Lion King 2; simba’s pride
12. “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”- Dr. Seuss
13. “You have brains in your head and feet in your shoes, you can steer yourself in any direction you choose!”- Dr. Seuss (Oh the lLaces You’ll Go)
14. Wicked (the book) (Yes, I did post about this quote a while back during the beginning of the summer. It seems like such a long time ago now.) 

There are a lot of creative thinking exercises that can be hard to start, but once you get really deep into it, it seems impossible to stop thinking. In advisory today we had a similar circumstance. We were trying to create group norms and after individual, small group, and then a large group discussion we ended up with 10 main ones. Then we decided we only wanted 5 because under 5 doesn’t seem like enough, but over 5 gets more difficult to remember, thus making things seem less important. Trying to narrow our list down to just 5 was difficult, and we didn’t actually finish within our time together today. 

Isn’t it great how creative thoughts tend to lead to more creative thoughts? You end up discovery so much more the longer you hack at an idea. 

I’ve also noticed how great thoughts can often come at the worst times, like when you are trying to get to bed and can’t stop thinking. Another example I have from today is when you are trying to get work done, but you are really not motivated a ton by it and can easily get distracted. I all of a sudden got the urge to finally try out my black light lightbulb I have. So I did, and it made my highlighting look so much cooler!!!!!!

I then remembered that I still have this tube thing that you can form into a shape and it will light up with the black light, so now I’ve been thinking about ways to use it with ID. Distractions can often be thought of as bad, but I wonder what it would look like to encourage distractions. (Bare with me, I have no idea where this thought is going, and I have no intentions of implying it to be a good idea, but I’m still curious.) 

I mean distractions often have to be a creative thought because your mind is trying to think of clever and different ways to keep you from whatever you are currently trying to do. What if you just constantly continued to follow each new train of thought? Every time a new idea came up, you would follow it. Eventually the ideas should get “better” in a creative sense, and then when you find one that you really like, try to complete it. What would you come up with? It would be like  physically creating a giant mind map with each new idea leading to another. 

It reminds me of Wiki Wars. (Another thing I learned from when other people were distracted.) During a Wiki War you have several people on Wikipedia. One person gives a start place and everyone has to get to that Wiki page, then once everyone is there, someone (not in the war) gives an end place. The race can then begin to see who can get to the end point by only using links between the Wiki pages. It is really neat to see how people manage to connect and bridge the gap between two seemingly different things. 

So, if ideas are good, and distractions lead to ideas, can distractions really be entirely a “bad” thing? Since distractions are typically creative ideas, they tend to lead to other creative ideas, and don’t we like to encourage this train of thinking? 

-just some thoughts of the day