Even though pandemic regulations don’t allow us to do half the things we might like to do at the moment, I don’t think I can be the only one who’s still finding it hard to find time to do everything that’s on my “to do” list.
I certainly intended to write two blog posts this weekend, as well as preparing several business-related articles and a stack of emails ready for the coming week.
But the weekend is almost over and I haven’t done any of that. I did manage to do two loads of washing, a stack of ironing, bake oat cakes and make a batch of tomato sauce to freeze. And I also have three new drafts written for the next Modern Pagan Prayers book.
But it seems that that project has occupied my brain so fully that I haven’t got space for any other words.
Not only is there not enough time to do everything I want to do, but I’m not even finding time to think everything I want to think.
And realising that, I remembered an idea from Douglas Adam’s The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul about how our minds are limited to a certain number of thoughts at any one time.
[Kate] remembered reading an article which had explained that the central processing unit of the human brain only had seven memory registers, which meant that if you had seven things in your mind at the same time and then thought of something else, one of the other seven would instantly drop out.
This idea of limited space for ideas is a concept Adams clearly found worth pursuing, as he returned to it in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:
Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe… The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.
I could definitely do with the latest model of Electric Monk.
At least this is one update for the blog, even if it’s very late and it’s not quite the one I’d hoped to write.
As for the photos, although there may be no connection between thoughts and snowdrops, I wondered if the fact the pictures are all on one theme would mean they only occupied one of my brain registers, leaving me space to be getting on with other writing tasks in the background.
I have a suspicion it hasn’t worked.
don't confuse the narrator 