The other day I wrote about starting intentionally (and stopping intentionally as well).
Today, I read this from Seth Godin’s Blog:
Standing at my desk this summer, it had just turned 10 am, and I realized that I’d already:
Heard from an old friend, engaged with three team members on two continents, read 28 blogs across the spectrum AND found out about the weather and the news around the world.
Half my life ago, in a similar morning spent in a similar office, not one of those things would have been true.
The incoming (and our ability to create more outgoing) is probably the single biggest shift that computers have created in our work lives. Sometimes, we subscribe or go and fetch the information, and sometimes it comes to us, unbidden and unfiltered. But it’s there and it’s compounding.
One option is to simply cope with the deluge, to be a victim of the firehose.
Another is to make the problem worse by adding more noise and spam to the open networks that we depend on.
A third might be, just for an hour, to turn it off. All of it. To sit alone and create the new thing, the thing worth seeking out, the thing that will cause a positive change.
As I finished reading this, I flashed on the thought “That thing could be a song.” That’s when the magpies in my head started piping up singing; “Songs add to the noise! Aren’t there enough songs already?”
They’re right of course. There are too many songs in the world, a daunting desultory deluge of ditties. But one worth seeking out? One that will cause a positive change? That takes intent.
Likely more than an hour of intent. But much like Anne Lamott’s famously bother had to work his project bird by bird, the hours of my intent have to perch themselves one after another to write a song which worth another’s seeking.
A song which will make a change requires intent.
