Tag: thinking

Reading and Listening – October Edition

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 2 Comments

Here is just a sampling of what I’ve been reading and listening to this past month.

Reading

I love the idea of a bullet journal, and I do use the method for my book journal. However, I like having a planner with all of my goals built in, a journal for books and reading, a notebook for notes, and a journal for quotes, prayers, thoughts, processing, etc. It works better for me. So many people love the bullet journal method that I may try again one of these years. Here are two articles on Bullet Journaling that came up in my reading this month for those of you who want to give it a try. If you do, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Can Bullet Journaling Save You

Anne Bogel’s experience with her bullet journal

I enjoy reading Cal Newport’s work, and this is his take on how to carve out time for creative work:

Getting Creative Things Done: How to Fit Hard Thinking into a Busy Schedule

I love Agatha Christie’s novels and thought I had read them all until I found this list recently. If I had ever read The Mystery of the Blue Train, I didn’t remember it at all. Are there any titles on the list that you want to try?

Agatha Christie’s Top 20 Novels

This article reminded me of the discussions I used to have with my children about the importance of what they read and watched. The things we take in eventually come out in our living, our words, and our actions as well as in our writing and artistic pursuits. What are you taking into your mind and heart these days?

Shoveling Mulch onto the Leaf Mold of the Mind

Listening:

I love mysteries and some of my favorite titles are in the Inspector Gamanche series by Louise Penny. It was a joy to hear some of my favorite podcasters talk about how much they love them, too.

Episode 96 of Out of the Ordinary

Rarely does a week go by when I don’t listen to a podcast or lecture on theology or the Bible. One of my favorites apps is from Ligonier.org because of all of the great content. Recently, I’ve been listening to Dr. Derek Thomas’s series on Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s not my first time listening to it and it won’t be my last, but every time I listen, I learn something new about Scripture, about Bunyan, and about our God. It’s a bit pricy, but you can watch the first lecture for free on the site and then wait for the series to go on sale. I always get the audio download so I can listen on my app on the go, but there is also a CD and DVD.

The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Guided Tour

I appreciate Karen Swallow Prior’s books and after reading On Reading Well, I sometimes wished I could take a literature class with her. While that’s not a possibility, I found a way to listen to her wise insights when she was a guest host on a literature podcast I enjoy, Close Reads. She and two other literature lovers and teachers walked through Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. If you don’t like Jane Austen, try one of the other books they’ve read through together. I’ve discovered some new favorites, and I bet you will, too. Here’s a link to the first episode:

Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments, if you found any of these links interesting or helpful.

Winter Reflection

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

Once New Year’s is over and January sets in, I spend more time thinking, musing, and meditating. Winter seems to be more conducive to slowing down and pondering ideas. I wonder if it’s because the cold drives us indoors to cuddle under a warm woolen blanket with a cozy sweater and a hot drink. Burrowing into a pile of warmth leads to more time alone with myself, which is the perfect opportunity to think about all the things I’ve been avoiding or not able to set aside time to deal with in busier times.

Image by janbrokes from Pixabay

I consider my yearly goals at the very beginning of January, as many others do, but then I move on to more profound thoughts. In the early morning when it’s still dark outside, and no one is awake except me and the cat, I have the silence and solitude to meditate. Snuggled in a quilt and woolly robe, I read my Bible and devotional books, jotting down thoughts and contemplating what the author is saying.  Sometimes another book I’ve been reading catches my attention in a richer way than mere entertainment so I focus on making sense of its deeper meaning. 

I think about and pray for my friends and family in those dark hours before dawn, giving the Holy Spirit room to bring certain people to my attention for prayer. I allow my mind to drift and make connections between the things I’m studying and my everyday life at home and work. Meditation allows me to pick up on strings of logic and networks of relationship that I might otherwise miss. Burying myself in thoughts and prayers allows the Lord to speak truth into my heart that I might not hear if I was living at a shallower level or surrounded by noise, real and virtual. 

Current devotional reading

Winter is my reflective season, which produces seeds of wisdom and truth that will yield a harvest for the rest of the year.

Do you find winter to be a good time to reflect and meditate? I’d love to hear about your meditations in the comments!

Morning Quiet

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 2 Comments
We live in a world full of noise. Everywhere we go, there are TVs and cell phones and radios. I work in a library, and even there, now that we no longer require silence and hush people, it can be noisy. If you are similar and you find noise interferes with thinking and meditation, what do you do?

If there isn’t a place of quiet, find a time of quiet. The best time I have found are those early morning hours before people want to get out of bed.

Most mornings I get up at 5:00 a.m. When I confess this to others, they are appalled at the thought of getting out of their cozy beds at that hour, far earlier than they need to get up to prepare for their day. Admittedly it is difficult to convince my body to leave the warmth of my bed some days, but I have a bigger goal in mind than bodily comfort. My morning time is a time for prayer, for contemplation, for creativity. Without it, I go through my day mindlessly and on auto-pilot.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, “That’s fine for you. You enjoy the morning.” Well, yes, I do. I’ve always been a lark and found it easy to get up early. Your quiet time may be in the evenings, long after everyone has gone to bed. However, the main reason morning works better for me is not because of my love for mornings. It is because, in the morning, the world has not yet had the opportunity to start demanding. By evening, I am depleted by the many people who have needed me and the tasks that required my attention. My own thoughts have had no chance of developing because I am too full of other people’s thoughts or I’m just too weary to think.

In the morning, I read Scripture and pray, and then with a fresh mind and a quiet heart, I can hear the thoughts I want to share and sometimes even write them down. C.S. Lewis said,

It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

In the quiet of that first hour, I am recentering my mind and heart on the true, the good, and the beautiful. Whenever I skip that time, the ‘wild animals” run the zoo of my mind, and I have a much harder time putting things into their correct perspective. Once I put aside my wishes and hopes for what the Lord is asking of me that day, I can see more clearly what to do and how to think. Once I find that quiet within, I can hear my true thoughts, underneath the stresses and to do’s and oughts and shoulds.

In the very early morning, my family is asleep and aside from the dog next door, the only thing I hear is the humming of my computer and the song of the birds. I can look out my window and see the sun just peeping up from the horizon and let the thoughts and ideas and feelings arise from inside my heart and mind and pour forth onto paper.

Since I do not live alone, I need to have two places in which to seek that morning quiet. Most mornings, I hide out in my bedroom because my husband leaves early for work and it is quiet there. Some mornings (on weekends and vacations particularly), he is still sleeping so I  wander downstairs to my book room with my coffee, close the doors, and seek my quiet there.

Whichever room I choose, the main requirement is that there are no competing voices in my head. That means I need to quiet the external voices—TV, radio, internet, etc. And then I need to quiet the internal voices—the clock, my desire to be lazy, my worries and anxieties, and all of the “ought to do’s”.

As I sit in silence before the Lord, I pray for wisdom to share what He has laid on my heart. Sometimes those sharings are spiritual, lessons I have learned or am learning, to help my fellow travelers on their journey through life. Other times I want to write about books, my favorite topic, and share what I have read that may be enjoyable or helpful for those reading. Occasionally I share a glimpse of my heart so that my readers can hear what is most important to me and what I am convinced ought to be most important to all of us.

However, if I’m bombarded with external voices and demands, I cannot read, meditate, and then compose what is on my heart and mind. So, I seek quiet.

Apparently, I’m not alone in this. Jesus got up early in the morning to pray and seek His Father’s will for Him:

Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed. (Mark 1:35)

So He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed. (Luke 5:16)

Surrounded by people and demands, Jesus knew that He could not pray or meditate or plan for what He should do and where He should go unless He had time alone in the quiet to pray. Martin Luther, Saint Benedict, and many other Christians also found the early morning a good time for prayer and meditation.

Will you join me and find your quiet time each day? It could be morning. Or perhaps nighttime is the best time for you. If so, you may need extra time to rid yourself of the day’s voices and demands to hear your own thoughts and those of God. Whenever and wherever you choose, give yourself time each day to read, pray, and meditate. It won’t be long before you find that your morning (or evening) quiet hour is the most valuable of your day.