Thinking, when you think about it, is a very strange thing. I think. There is always some sort of conversation going on within your head. Sometimes more than one at a time. There are fragments of thought, just a passing note of something seen, heard, felt, or remembered. Other times there are long meditations. At the same time, no matter what thinking is going on, our brains are processing messages from all our senses--what we are seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, or tasting. Our brains are super multi-taskers. I have driven home from work many a time (when I was in the workforce) lost in thought, arriving home with no conscious recollection of the journey. My brain took care of getting me safely there, but did not bother to record the process, letting me concentrate on whatever was occupying my thoughts.
So, while I have certainly been thinking for the past few days, I did not think of anything I felt worthy of blogging about. Or maybe I was just lazy. Chances are I was mostly engrossed in a book. I know, that is a familiar story with me.
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| My Kindles |
Before we left for our vacation, to ensure that I would always have something to read in the evenings or if I took a rest day in the cabin, I visited the Kindle free book list. I downloaded quite a number of these free reads. Of course, Amazon does not offer free books just out of kindness. Oh, no. These free books are often a trap for readers like me. They are there to acquaint customers with authors they haven't tried before, and most of the books are the first book of a series.
Well, their plan works! When I find a book that I enjoy, that is well written, and that has characters I like and want to know more about, I'm hooked. I want to find out what happens next! What happens next is, of course, that I buy more books. Fortunately, many of the series that are introduced as free books are also among the more inexpensive. I also find that many of the free books are not ones whose authors I want to follow.
Over the weekend I started reading one of the free books that I had downloaded before vacation. I liked it. I wanted to know what happened next. Result--I read four novels and two short stories (all that are currently available) in the series. While some of the values held by the characters in the books were not my values, I cared about these people. I like it when an author creates a world and people that seem real, that I can sympathize and empathize with; that I feel like I know and I want them to have good outcomes in their lives. Without these feelings, reading would not be half as much fun!
I was listening to KLOVE (Christian Radio) this morning and they reported that the average person has something like 1200 words of self-talk per minute! That's a lot of jabbering going on in our heads! The sad thing is, they also reported that only about 100 of those words are positive in nature. Isn't that sad?
ReplyDeleteMy inquiring mind asks: How did they come up with these numbers?? How do you count the words and nature of what is in someone's head? (And you'd have to count a lot of thoughts in a lot of brains to come up with a generality about their number and nature.)
DeleteNot contradicting. Just curious.