The Thinking Window

Everyone has a "thinking window." It's where your mind goes when it's searching for something—a word, a solution, a fresh idea, truth. It's where you sort and toss and  prioritize. It's where you remember and reconsider and refresh. You look through your thinking window to the other side and see something from a different perspective. All new.

I can't look out just any window and think. I wish I could because in the last month I could have uncovered a wealth of new images looking at the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico. I could have heightened my perspective looking up to Mt. Ranier, Whiteside Mountain, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. If travel enabled new ideas to morph into words, I would have a lifetime reserve.

I love the way Anne Lamott talks about writers and their work. In Bird by Bird she says,

         “Hope is a revolutionary patience for writers.  Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.  You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

Ideas will come—once I settle myself again—at my thinking window. I want to believe the sights I have seen and the beauty I have witnessed will over time come together as fresh fodder for the written word. Let them sink in and blend and multiply and then reinvent themselves, bursting forth in new thoughts and ranges of colors.

The Apostle Paul also gives wisdom to those who search. He offers a glimpse into a future where believers will find completion in God alone. Until then we will always be searching, looking through our own window of thought, trying our best to figure things out. Paul wrote to people in a big city where life was busy and distractions were many—not unlike today, just 2000 years later saying, "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." (1 Corinthians13:12 NIV)

Probably the first thing you do each morning is look out a window. Maybe you look for a ray of sunshine, a glimmer of hope, meaning to a dream, or wisdom for a big decision. Take some time at that window, allowing some "revolutionary patience" to still your heart and fill your senses with the wonders of a hoping creation.

We can learn at our thinking window. Dawn will come.