Confusing Seaweed

Quiet:  With little or no sound; free of disturbing noise. (Ed. Note:  I did not see the adjective "disturbing" as a possibility.  It's nice.)

Time: The inevitable progression into the future with the passing of present events into the past.  (Ed. Note: You knew this was going to be a cool definition.)  The indefinite continued progress of existence of events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.  (Ed. Note: God, this is like eating M&Ms or good, salty, vinegar potato chips.)

Quiet Time: (Ed. Note: I'm not even going to try to come up with a definition that would marry those two concepts into a coherent ham sandwich.)

My morning Quiet Times have definitely evolved over the years.  While I was working - especially when I had early reveille so that I could get on the road to a distant factory - I had a strict 20 minute policy.  Whatever I needed to get done I got done in 20 minutes - this ended up being mostly praying and trying to stay awake.  Meditation or sitting quietly turned into a semi-hallucinatory state, a fugue recovery experience (Ed. Note: "Fugue" was my Word of the Day on Saturday so I had to work it in.) so I tried to avoid it.

Now that my time in the morning is a lot more unstructured I find that meditation is possible and, even more importantly for me, that free-form mind time can be quite pleasant.  I try to sit and see what happens.  I try to avoid too much thinking but I don't try to force this - sometimes good, positive solutioney things happen.  I know that the brain is working away beneath the level of consciousness so as long as I give it some space to ramble it often comes up with better solutions to all of my horrible conundrums better than I can accomplish by actively trying to solve them.

Most importantly I avoid screens.  Screens, on the whole, are pretty evil and pretty destructive.  Our brains, which have been evolving for a long time in a screen-free environment, are not equipped to handle the crush of information thrown at them and are especially not equipped to handle the speed with which this information changes - part of the addiction, of course, is trying to keep up with the newest, hottest bit of crap, even though that crap is often wrong - and especially ESPECIALLY crap that is being manipulated by people who have PhDs in behavioral psychology from really impressive universities and have absolutely no interest in truth or reality or anything except getting you to return to look at their advertisements.

Yes, I understand the irony of this rant that I'm composing on a screen.  Piss off, OK?