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Thoughts Are Like a Leaf Blower
Don’t let your thinking carry you away.
I was sitting in conversation with a friend on a dewy, blue-sky morning. We sat side by side, with our knees angled toward each other in red Adirondack chairs, holding steaming cups of coffee. There were flowers bursting from garden beds; a long serpentine hedge that separated us from the street down below; birds hopped busily all over the place. Our view was the evergreen trees, Lake Washington, a peak of the Cascade mountain range rising at the horizon.
Inside this beautiful universe we were lost in the flow of a conversation, one that surrounded my friend’s What-Now juncture in life.
We were in it, jamming away, exploring, creating ideas in our own imagination fortress . . . until . . . what the hell?
Leaf blower.
It came from a few houses down — not an unusual sound from a suburban neighborhood where people were obsessed with yard hygiene. But here’s what it did: it pricked me out of my flow state. One second, nothing else existed but the two of us and our creative genius and then . . . the screaming blare of the goddamn leaf blower.
Here’s what I usually do at times like this. I break down our conversational fortress by griping/apologizing:
