“We’re out of milk.”

 

“Ding! There’s another message I gotta respond to…”

 

“There’s that darn bill again…”

Whether by interest or intrusion, **things** come to mind.

“But, I’m doing this thing now!”

Maybe if we ignore it, whatever it is will come back in just the right way so that we’d be able to do something about it, … later.

Or, in our better moments, we might wonder:

“How can I deliberately get this to come back to me?

And so we can create a signal of one sort or another such as:

• Objects of the ideas themselves – e.g. the empty milk jug sitting near the door
• Symbols of the written word – e.g. the phrase “Pay the bill!” scrawled on the fridge or neatly listed in a task manager
• A clock time alert – e.g. a reminder to respond to some message an hour from now
• An experience alert – (also known as “I’ll try to remember”) e.g. suddenly papers left in the printer come to mind while in the shower, so you deeply imagine *leaving the bathroom* to trigger a scene of picking up the papers
• A person alert – asking someone else to remind us (also known as a marvelous way to build resentment)

We throw some message in a bottle into the sea of the Not Now so we can continue with the Now.

Unfortunately, we now hit another snag.

The Not Now is often littered with other signals, made by ourselves and others, crushing whatever signal-to-noise ratio may have once existed, as life’s winds and waters mockingly throw overboard whatever we held in working memory.

Sailing the seas is more than the written word.

Engaging well means being able to:

• Anchor ourselves in the midst of scatter, exhaustion, or overwhelming options
• Raising our sails to move forward, whatever direction makes sense to us in the moment
• Recognize important matters as they arise and shifting when felt useful
• Allow what we want into our worlds, while filtering what might be useful
• Decide on our own directions
• Maintain or change course with greater clarity over days, weeks, into the years
• Avoid force while keeping the ability to decide for ourselves, wherever possible
• Nurture the natural creative forces within to not only fill our sails, but to discover new places we might want to go

– Kourosh

PS – What makes for your sense of being meaningfully “productive?” Feel free to comment below.