Blowing My Mind

In recent years I feel I've let my creativity fall to the wayside a bit. I've been active with writing, but much of what I've written has been pretty bland and factual; mostly to help spread information.

That's not the kind of stuff that keeps artistic/inventive juices flowing. Consequetly, I've begun to feel a little bit... well, stale.

I recently discovered mind maps and thought I'd sit down to give one a try. I figured I didn't have much to lose. I always enjoyed art time in grade school. Why not tap into my inner 2nd grader once again?

With colored pencils and washable markers borrowed from my kids I sat down to see what would come of dumping some of the contents of my mind onto paper. I'll spare you the details of that mess. But, let me just tell you, WHOA! I had a lot of stuff in there that needed flushing out. I was shocked to see all the twists and turns, curls and twirls my thoughts we're making.

My verdict on the mind map: helpful. And, fun. I think it very likely I will continue to use mind maps in the future.

I made a second map to simplify some of the conclusions my first map brought me to because I felt a bit overwhelmed with where to begin. (Trust me an 8x11 piece of paper was way to small for all the mess I had going on there. It was gnarly.) I may have over simplified but (trust me on this) after the knotted mass that was my first map I needed something simple to soothe me. I was tempted to keep going (which I guess is kinda the point of mind maps (supposedly they help your mind think more productively) but I made myself stop for the love of all things pure and simple.

For fun, I thought I'd share my second mind map here:




If you noticed the smudges on the paper just feel free to forget about those. *Someone* we know was a little too deep in concentration, and forgot to swallow her saliva. When she went to blow a speck off her page she *may* have spit all over it. How lame awesome is she!?