What is your focus

When I look at something, I often wonder what I see. A good exercise to test your awareness is to describe what you think you saw to someone, or write it down.

We have all heard how the average person only uses a low percentage of their brain. The first brain power user we immediately think of is Albert Einstein.

Years ago, more years than I’d like to remember, I took a meditation class to learn how to relax. Imagine a diagram of a cross-section of your brain showing the outer layers as noisy and active with all sorts of unorganized trivial thought processes floating around. Looking deeper into the cross-section you notice the inner layers quieting down to calm and peaceful depths. I wondered how I was supposed to reach the calm and peaceful depths of my brain.

While you are outside in the sunlight, or inside a brightly lit room, sit down, try to relax a little by closing your eyes for a minute or so. You should notice quite a bit of energy reduction from all the activity your eyes generate. You can also experiment with ear plugs. It is easy to notice a slight peaceful difference.

Your eyes and ears may be part of the noisy noise activity in your brain, but your short-term memory banks are overflowing with more insignificant thoughts than you can imagine. Just a few of these thoughts could ruin your reputation if know what I mean, but the average person has pure and honest thoughts. Wishful thinking!

Remember when you were a child and adults told you certain things you shouldn’t do? Teachers of education, as well as various religious elders, told us what we shouldn’t do. So we follower their advice, while they were around, but did as we pleased when we thought no one we knew was watching.

There is a possibility that whatever someone taught us to do or not to do makes a difference on what the content of the noisy noise activity that swirls around on the surface of our imaginary cross-section of our brain.

There are endless techniques of meditating or relaxing. We may say relax from what? Imagine how much noise there is around you, especially if you live in a city, or how many business deals you make in a day. There are endless reasons that can cause stress, or problems of various degrees that disturb us. Noise, bright lights, weather, working or visiting in an unfriendly environment to name a few.

This noisy noise activity can get so intense that it may effect your health, or give you an attitude that could cause you to lose your job or your friends. Relatives generally stick with you through the thick or the thin.

My point of this long winded post is our focus and how aware we are of our surroundings. Our focus can benefit our learning skills, our writing skills, and our future reflections of our past.

Several years ago, I read about a young teacher from the north mid-western part of the USA that built a tiny boat he had imagined in a dream. It was kind of shaped like a pumpkin seed. He completed the construction of his boat and launched it on the coast of the Atlantic and sailed to the UK. This has been accomplished  by several people, but what stood out in this particular journey, was the fact that this young teacher was aware of a very peaceful silence where he had thoughts he never imagined thinking.

I heard this same story from an interview of someone who drives a desert safari land cruiser into the Golden sand Dunes of Arabia in the United Arab Emirates. He too was aware of a silence when he had thoughts he never imaged thinking.

Perhaps something happens to us when we push through to the other side of the noisy noise activity or somehow eliminate it temporarily during our relaxation, our quiet time, mediation, prayer, or far from the noise in our everyday environment? What do those ancient monks know about silence that we are unaware of?

Some people suggest the calm and peaceful depths of our brains is where the thoughts we never dreamed thinking may be!

Maybe all those adults and teachers were not trying to form our thoughts into little DO BEES, but teaching us to FOCUS?

What is your focus?

Scrivener Literature & Latte

After researching writing programs available for Mac OS X, I decided to download and register Scrivener. I was impressed with all of the writing programs; they fit the requirements for various novice and professional writers. Maybe someday I’ll own a copy of each one. I am amazed how far the technology has evolved since the personal computer was created. It didn’t take long to decide what I was going to do.

Here is what impressed me the most (from the Literature and Latte website):

Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers. It won’t try to tell you how to write – it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application.

Scrivener provides access to the full power of the OS X text system: add tables, bullet points and images and format your text however you want. Define ranges of text as footnotes and they become footnotes when you export or print. And because the way you view your text onscreen may not always be how you want to see it in print, Scrivener makes it easy to format the printed or exported text completely differently from what is onscreen – leaving you free to focus on the actual writing.

The cork notice-board is one of the writer’s most familiar tools. Before Scrivener, though, the index cards were not connected to anything (other than ideas, of course); any changes to the order on the corkboard would have to be replicated manually in the draft. In Scrivener, every document is attached to a virtual index card onto which you can jot a synopsis. Use the corkboard to shuffle these index cards around – which is instantly reflected in the structure of your draft.

No more switching between multiple applications to refer to research files: keep all of your research – image files, PDF documents, movies, sound files and web pages – right inside Scrivener. And unlike in other programs that only let you see one document in a window at a time, in Scrivener you can view a research document in one pane and compose your text in another right alongside it. Transcribe an interview, make notes about a picture, or just refer back to another chapter, all from within the same program.

Because sometimes you want to blank out the rest of the world while you write – or at least the rest of the screen. Scrivener boasts the most advanced full screen editing mode out there. Fade the background in and out, choose the width of the “paper” and get writing. Prefer an old-school green-text-on-black look? No problem. Flexible preferences mean you can set up the full screen mode however you want. Change documents, refer to your notes, apply keywords – or just write – in one of the most beautiful distraction-free modes available.

Scrivener is a Mac OS X only application.

I am totally excited about starting my first Scrivener writing project to get hands on experience – Thanks Keith Blount for creating a great Mac writing environment!