I spent a little time this morning and imported posts from my contemplative computing blog. I’ve been moving things from Typepad to WordPress over the last few months, and realized that it actually made sense to move those posts here.
For one thing, whenever I talk about deliberate rest I end up also talking about issues that are the subject of my earlier book, The Distraction Addiction: you can’t really talk about mind-wandering without distinguishing it from distraction, or explaining how together mind-wandering and focus help you do things that neither can alone.
Also, people often are interested in hearing about how deliberate rest and focused work (or deliberate work?) interact. It’s good to have time for both, but it’s clear from my study of creative lives that when they perform a pad a deux, or are thoughtfully woven together, they’re far more powerful and expressive than if they’re treated as separate.
Finally, midway through REST I realized that I was actually writing a kind of sequel to The Distraction Addiction. I started thinking about rest and creativity when I was at Cambridge working on contemplative computing, so chronologically the two books are more like twins than prequel and sequel.
Anyway, I’ll have to clean up broken links and so on, but that’ll be for later.