Clearing Out My Brain

There's a lot of emphasis on clearing out objects.

Clearing your house, your closet, your car, your desk, will supposedly clear your life and give you new-found peace of mind.

But what about clearing out your thoughts, your computer, your information cache?

No, I don't simply mean emptying out your computer via pushing the "empty cache" button, but truly cleaning out your information overload.

As many of you know, I've been obsessing about putting together the best possible homeschooling high school experience for Fantasy Boy. As part of this seemingly neverending search, I've been collecting URL after URL.

Yes, they are all in one folder. No, I don't have that folder open. But the point is that I know those URLs are out there, in my universe, waiting to be read.

And I know what I did read this weekend - 15 essays, most of which were written by reluctant, but rapidly improving writers who I feel are at a crucial point in their writing development and deserve my undivided attention. And I am about to catch up reading the wonderful work of the fellow writers in my online writing group. And I still need to get started reading three books - one for research purposes, and the other two for what I'll call "soul needs" for current writing projects. And I read and edited the last third of an 119-page novel by a very talented 13-year-old. And I finished a book, staying up late, late last night so I could finally clear that off my plate.

So taking time to read these impersonal URLs just doesn't seem to be immediately on the horizon.

And yet there they are, taking up space in my brain.

So maybe casting aside should include information, in our overly information-rich age.

Let us not just strive to rid our lives of extraneous objects, but of extraneously distracting thoughts.

What's Cooking

Well, nothing today, as D and I had a "breakfast meeting" over a bagel out today, and we all just had a very early dinner at La Shish. For Detroit area folks, you can probably all appreciate what a boon it is to A2 to have LaShish finally arrive. And for those who don't... check it out.