Wandering Thoughts

I sat down in a sunny corner of the Talmadge Building a little while ago with the intention of working on clarifying some details for a paper I'm writing. Things seemed to be going well. I jotted down some ideas, then thought of an important question that I needed to answer in order to proceed, and looked out the window and chewed on my pencil as I thought about the question.

Five minutes later I snapped back to reality and realized that I had just been thinking about almost every topic except the one at hand. Without consciously taking note of my increasingly divergent trains of thought, I had let my mind jump in rapid succession from one thought to the next. These thoughts included the following:

• I recently read an article in Runner's World magazine about light in the wintertime, and was impressed by a list of varying intensities of light in different situations. For instance, even a cloudy day provides significantly more light than the brightest artificially-lit public buildings, and typical home lighting tends to be miserably weak. I wondered if there is a significant difference between the light intensity you experience outdoors in the middle of a sunny July day and the light intensity you experience outdoors in the middle of a sunny day in January just by virtue of the position of the sun in the sky.
  
  
• I noticed a dull ache in my lower back and contemplated how very few chairs and benches on campus really provide good back support, and how the wall I was leaning against provided even less back support. I decided that I was willing to experience a little physical discomfort by sitting on the ground with my back against a wall only because my current position by the window exposed me to more sunlight than anywhere else on campus that immediately came to mind.
  
  
• I recalled a conversation with my roommate yesterday afternoon, and wondered why I had decided to take off to campus when she was clearly having a horrible day and probably wanted to talk. I wondered why I hadn't perceived this yesterday. Was it because I was so selfishly focused on the fact that it was already 3:00 and I hadn't done any schoolwork at all that I consciously decided to go to campus and avoid being distracted by roommate talk? Or was it because when we started talking, she quickly turned the conversation away from herself and I decided she didn't really want to talk about it anyway? Either way, I felt bad, and determined that I would apologize to her when I saw her in the evening.
  
  
• I thought about going to a friend's house with my roommates last night to watch a movie and for the first time seeing his basement t.v. room and bookshelves piled high with board games. I wondered if maybe next week we should replace movie night with game night, and whether my brother might want to come along.
  
  
• I wondered how you play the game Sequence. I remembered researching a question about who Bill Barret is and why he recommends the game, and how I thought the game looked sort of boring when I examined the box in the bookstore. I decided that my opinion was primarily influenced by the fact that the box and the game board aren't particulary aesthetically pleasing, and that I should probably give that game a chance sometime. Maybe next Friday.
  
  
• I thought about some old 100 Hour Board posts I have been reading lately, and how strange it was to see Toasteroven's name as a question-asker rather than a question-answerer, and I was amused to recall his apology for asking about how to get on the 100 Hour Board. I thought about my first experience with Board writers, playing croquet and bocce ball at a park over the summer, and how interesting it had been for me to see them in real life, and how fun it was to read our readers' April descriptions of Board writers now that I had actually met the people they were attempting to describe.

And then I realized that I was thinking about the 100 Hour Board instead of my paper. What amazed me was just how many new topics my mind was able to cover before I even noticed that I had left the topic at hand. It also made me wonder about what is going on in my mind even at those times when I think I am on task. I'm pretty sure I let my thoughts jump around a lot more than I realize, and I'll bet other people do the same thing. What differentiates between on-task and not-on-task moments is only how frequently I am able to switch back to original topic.