Silence, Thinking, Residue or lackthereof

First and foremost, words cannot accurately express how amazing the last 3 days were. I barely talked to a soul. I took long walks up and down steep hills every day. I made friends with a neighbor dog. I stared into space often and for absorbidant amounts of time. (P.S. absorbidant doesn't seem to exist in the online dictionaries. I wanted to check my spelling but was met with suggestions of absorbant and absurd and the like) Now this staring into space is what brings me to the theme of this post.

Was staring into space (or at the wall) for massive amounts of time wasting time? One of my architecture professors (Marc Blizard) once said, well at least I remember it as being him, that whenever we are thinking we must produce residue. That we are not thinking if we do not have some kind of evidence to prove it or document it. That always stuck with me. While I think part of his motivation to say that to naïve second year architecture students was to get us to make something while we were 'thinking' so laboriously, I also believe that he was right in a lot of ways - especially in order to document our thinking. Even if you are doodling or making small paper sculptures, if there is some wonderful epiphany that happens during this action you can go back to it. You can find that train of thought. Where if you are lying in bed trying desperately to fall asleep (which I was just doing not too long ago), there is no way to trace back to the thought the next day. Many people say that it is because you fell asleep right after the great epiphany, but I simply don't agree. When you have that moment you know that you must get up and write it down or do what it was that you thought of - so you ARE lucid and have not yet fallen prey to the Sandman (or Freddy Kreuger, if you so choose).

On the other hand, you really must purge yourself, every once in a while (more for the neurotic ones), of irrational and anxious thoughts. You must go through the day, the week, the year, a relationship until your mind can rest from those ridiculous thoughts. You must play out every way possible that the conversation with your mother will go when you tell her that you cannot do dinner next Friday. And you must think about every potential thought that you can, that might be worth a few minutes before you can tackle more substantial problems - or perhaps before you can enjoy the peaceful sound of silence.

So there you go. I made no record of my thoughts. I had purging thoughts and I had thoughtful thoughts, but I believe that the important ones, that for the time being I may have lost, will come back to me - or perhaps they already have. Perhaps just the mere fact that I was allowed the time to come to those conclusions have changed a lot of what is running through my head right now. Ok, now I am just babbling and attempting to discuss things I have absolutely no authority over.

That was that. I had a lot of time to myself these past few days. Maybe that has put me in this 'pensive' mood, but all in all I am much more relaxed and much clearer about things. I have a better understanding of the pieces I am currently working on and the ones that I just "finished".

I am ready for an exciting fall.