Finding Thoughts

Sitting at my desk, wanting to write, looking out my window at the leaves blowing in the autumn breeze and the bicyclists trying to get in one more ride before the season changes to too cold, I'm attempting to get some inspiration.

Though ideas of what to write about are plentiful in this metropolis, sometimes discerning one idea from another can be more difficult than it seems.

A friend of mine recently suggested I get an Ideas Journal. She uses one to jot personal reminders and thesis ideas for her latest research projects. I, on the other hand, thought I would find one useful to record ideas and observations that could later be developed into a blog post, poem, story, or in rare cases, my own research paper.

In the kerfuffle of city living, it can sometimes be hard to hold onto an idea long enough before it gets replaced by another. With the thought of someone bumping into you on the subway, or how you just smelled the sweet smell of street meet, you can imagine how attainable many ideas can be, but also often quite forgettable. Though not all ideas are important to note, it's easy to misplace the ones that are!

With an Ideas Journal, I will be able to quickly note what I thought was so novel at that exact point in time. The trick will be to remember I've got my journal and that I should actually write in it. It's just big enough to write full sentences, but small and light enough to throw in my bag for convenience.

Finding thoughts will be much easier since all I'll have to do is flip the pages of my journal and then decipher what I meant, or why I wrote what I did. In actuality, finding thoughts is not the challenge. The difficult part is finding ones that are meaningful.

I wonder what thoughts my journal will hold. But perhaps more interestingly, I wonder what yours will unfold.