Why is time needed

No time, no ideas. Of course I do need time, as most people, even when they do not recognise it. I need time to think, to read and to write. I need time to exercise, reflect, contemplate, edit,  learn. As Paul Graham observed recently, people who think clearly need to write. With writing comes clarity, ideas, an objective sense of reality. This is certainly true in my case.

Writing is an essential part of the way I live. Indeed without writing I would probably live in permanent confusion. As I write the world becomes more visible, the mist dissipates, some order appears slowly. But writing takes time, and is difficult. It takes time because it is difficult. Writing fiction is like creating a world, if not from scratch, at least different enough from what, the world we think we know, everyday. Writing a book on any subject is similar to programming, once one language is chosen.

Ideas into Words

Again Paul Graham wrote an essay about putting ideas into words, which I find illuminating. So, writing is big consumer of time. So is reading, yet most new ideas come from our reading. The process that churns ideas from our reading material to other activities, physical or mental, including writing, is itself time consuming. Take, for example, doing photography work. In my case I go walking and look for subjects, trees, buildings, skies, leaves, people.

Walking is for me the best exercise, inspiring, tiring, every walk a voyage of discovery, wherever it is, whatever the time of day. This source of inspiration is then distilled, through revisiting in thought, editing pictures, and of course writing. The landscapes, the smiles, the stones, come back in dreams, or simple inspiration for new stories.

Inspiration

From the complex mix, reading, walking, listening, photography, emerge ideas, that form the source of everything else, stories, travel, fresh ambitions. 

From this it can be deducted that blogging is a kind of way to note what the diverse impressions are. Blogging also needs time, but this is also a time saver, if well managed, a kind of diary of thoughts, impressions, ideas to follow on, sometime.

Now, the next question must be, how do we get time? This then leads to the endless problem of organising one’s time, itself a matter requiring clarity of thoughts and the simple (!) device of prioritisation. What matters most? Regular exercise, writing everyday, reading twenty minutes every morning, grocery delivery?… one observation is that active, that is not happily retired, people do far more when they are working than later when they are retired. They do different things of course, but without organisation, and the will to remain active, time just flows, and its every day disappearance is a sign of sure decline. Again Paul may help if we follow his advice on How to do Great Work:

“If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it’s not just a point labelled “work hard.””

What the robot says

In conclusion, carving out time for writing is essential if we want to discover new ideas. It’s during those quiet moments with pen in hand or fingers on the keyboard that our thoughts can truly flow and take shape. So, let’s embrace the value of time in our creative processes. By allowing ourselves the space to write, we open the door to innovation and inspiration. Remember, great ideas often need a little time to bloom. So, take a breath, set aside some moments for writing, and watch as fresh ideas begin to unfold.