On the way back from Cerro Punta I rode the bus for 9 hours. It was too dark to read but too early to sleep. So I sat there and thought. After a while it became thrilling. I realized that I had enough time. I could let my mind expand in whatever directions I wanted and I wouldn't be rushed to finish. Eventually the bus became like a cocoon. I was safe, unmoving, just my thoughts and how they wandered. I followed every thought that came to me casually until some association took it another way. Afterwards I couldn't remember everything, but I felt refreshed, and what I did remember was profound and helpful.

In In Praise of Idleness Bertrand Russell urged people to give themselves up to this from time to time and he called it a leisure and a luxury. It was to be an event where you weren't working to create something or become employed in an industrious task. But in our manic lives we rarely, if ever at all, recognize this option, and scramble constantly from one task to the other without ever giving ourselves a break. Even when we go to the beach we are "working" on a tan. I read somewhere else that the mind needs time to process information, and that staring into space can be a boost to the thinking process, because in this idleness we are making unconscious connections. When we cram our ears full of Ipods every waking hour we aren't giving our brains the opportunity for mental expansion.

In normal life I don't allow myself that luxury. Time must be spent more efficiently. Even if I do sit down with the objective of casually thinking in mind, the second that I come up with an interesting thought I derail it and begin writing it down. In that way I am not engaging in thinking luxury, but i am doing work. There is purpose to that thinking because I need it to write. And the only way that I will allow myself to indulge in the pleasures of thinking is if I am unable to reach a pen.