I'm in

“I will wear white, I will smell of roses,”

“Her aura is made of poetry, roses, and galaxies”

“The result of our addiction to constant activity is a dearth of idle time and, hence, a dearth of time in which the brain is in its default mode. And though some may consider “doing nothing” unproductive, a lack of downtime is bad for our well-being, because idle time allows our default network to make sense of what we’ve recently experienced or learned. It allows our integrative thinking processes to reconcile diverse ideas without censorship from the executive brain. It allows us to mull over our desires and shuffle through our unattained goals. Those internal conversations feed our ongoing first-person narrative of life, and they help develop and reinforce our sense of self. They also allow us to connect divergent information to form new associations, and to step back from our issues and problems to change the way we frame them, or to generate new ideas. That gives our bottom-up elastic thinking networks the opportunity to search for creative, unexpected solutions to tough problems. On that night she invented her character Frankenstein, had Mary Shelley possessed a cell phone, rather than resting and letting her thoughts wander, she might have reached for the device; its many lures might have attracted her conscious attention and suppressed the emergence of her idea. The associative processes of elastic thinking do not thrive when the conscious mind is in a focused state. A relaxed mind explores novel ideas; an occupied mind searches for the most familiar ideas, which are usually the least interesting. Unfortunately, as our default networks are sidelined more and more, we have less unfocused time for our extended internal dialogue to proceed. As a result, we have diminished opportunity to string together those random associations that lead to new ideas and realisations.”

“When Teresa of Avila was asked what she did in prayer, she replied, ‘I just allow myself to be loved.’”

“Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time.”

I want to know you. You seem like someone worth knowing. Every day I feel like I’m surrounded by people with hard edges and sour faces but I get the sense that you’re different. Too often people seem to think that they have the answers to everything. Their faces are trapped in permascowls and they can’t be bothered with anything besides their own narcissism. You aren’t like that. You still ask questions. You’re still looking for the answers.