The Coaster of Thought
Weekly Writing Prompt No. 67
Hello lovely people and thank you for a. opening this email and b. joining me for my weekly writing prompt. These are my attempts at exercising my creative muscle, and I hope they help you exercise yours. There are no rules, there is no right or wrong way to do them, there is simply your way. Whatever works for you is good.
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For those new to The Writing Shed, the weekly writing prompt is the core of my activity here on Substack. Paid members can also find an archive of courses I’ve created and access all past writing prompts, flash fiction, writing hints and tips, and essays in The Index.
So have fun, enjoy your writing, and create heaps.
I’m guilty m’lud of taking the world around me for granted. I look at the wonders of creation and barely give them a second thought. Of course, that tree is growing, my dog wants me to pat him, and a friend says hello. All of these things feel commonplace, ordinary, and unexceptional. But, when I stopped ‘looking’ and started ‘seeing’, I realised they are none of these things.
Let me take a step back a moment and begin at the beginning where all the best stories start and ask you a question too. What do you really ‘see’ or think about the world around you and why things are the way they are? It’s something I’ve been doing a lot of recently for one reason or another, and it follows on from a regular type of conversation Stevie and I have that goes a little like this:
‘Any idea why a flock of geese fly in formation?’ whilst looking up at the sky watching the birds overhead.
‘None whatsoever sweetie.’
‘Mmmmm, let’s just add that to the long list of things we don’t understand then eh!’
‘OK, let’s do that’.
Now you may be able to give me the science behind the gosling formation flying team although I suspect you won’t be able to tell me ‘why’ they do it, how it came to be a good idea, or which goose had the idea first and who they communicated it to the others.
Perhaps it was a conversation that went a little like this;
‘Hey guys, I’ve got this great idea, if we fly in a V shape we’d all benefit from the drag created by the one in front making it easier to fly long distances.’
‘What d’yer mean Henry? ‘What about the one in front, that means they’re doing all the work, so who goes up front?’
‘Well, we could take it in turns to be upfront.’
‘Oooo I’m not sure Jimmy the Flap would like that, he’s the boss y’know.’
And when you think about it our whole world is made up of questions like that. Why does a seed grow into an Oak and not an Ash? Why do ecological systems fail when you remove or add a species? And how did we come to have all the ‘stuff’ around us that we do?
I was pondering this whilst sitting in bed the other night and my eye fell on the coaster on my bedside cabinet. It occurred to me that this was a perfect example of what I’m thinking of. I look at it daily but I didn’t really ‘see’ it until I started thinking about the idea of it, not the idea for the picture or slogan, but the idea of the coaster itself.
That coaster is a perfect example of ‘thought’ in action, not the little thoughts that flit through our head, but the BIG THOUGHTS that create the reality we see around us. For example, who had the original thought of a coaster? What circumstance made it a good idea to put a ‘thing’ underneath another ‘thing’? And who decided to use cork – not in relation to the coaster itself, but someone picking some up and wondering what it might be useful for?
Perhaps they had already tried eating it, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. What happened to show people cork had heat retention properties that eventually led to someone else using it as the base of a coaster? Then there’s the shape of this particular coaster, the slogan and the image, the thickness of it and the laminating. Not to mention the ‘thought’ about selling it in a fancy goods gift store. All of these are thoughts, each one was ‘original’ at some point in the past – we just don’t know what that past is or how to access it to understand.
What I’m trying to say in a very roundabout and garbled way is best expressed by David Bohm (quantum physicist and friend of Einstein) ‘Thought made the world and then said I didn’t do it’.
We may think the world around us is real, and at a five senses level it is, but it’s also all made up of thought. Thought drives everything in and of our world whether we can see it or not, from the glorious divine thought that allows geese to decide to fly in formation, to the seemingly mundane thought about a coaster. EVERY SINGLE THING IN OUR REALITY was once an original thought that sprang from somewhere!
And, as I was musing on the coaster another thought occurred to me that it and I are made of the same basic ‘stuff’ at a sub-molecular level. So what action forces a coaster to hold its form and not become a human like me? And what is it about me that keeps a human form rather than that of a coaster instead? In some way where do I end and the coaster begin?
Perhaps the concept of the coaster, something that collectively the world has agreed looks and acts like a coaster, is the very thing that holds it all together. Perhaps it’s this collective consciousness that keeps everything in the world the way it is, and perhaps if we were to change that collective consciousness the world would change.
It is this same universal thought that tells my body how to repair itself. The Haynes Human Body Repair Manual is part of the in-built intelligence we don’t access day-to-day because it is just there, working in a background we don’t think about or ‘see’. I’m beginning to see that this same universal, built-in intelligence is the same as the universal thought which allows the concept of a coaster to arise in someone after the idea of cork as a heat trap arose in someone earlier. That same intelligence allowed those two concepts to come together to create something I look at but don’t ‘see’ which I took for granted for the longest time, until now!
The post The Coaster of Thought appeared first on my original WordPress blog in 2016, in 2020 I renamed the blog and changed the URL. I moved it here to Substack in 2021 and am reposting it to see if anyone finds it interesting!
The Prompt
Thought is universal as this is how we humans navigate the world we live in.
In this prompt, I invite you to consider what might happen if ‘thought’, the capacity for thought, disappeared. Here one minute, gone the next!
Please share your poetry or prose in the comments below. Remember, you never know where today’s prompt may take you in the future!
Reflect
I include a reflection opportunity with every writing prompt because our writing always wells up from our inner landscape.
What might you look at today and ‘see’ for what it truly is?
As a coach, mentor, and counsellor I work with many people on different life paths. Some hope to write a best-selling book, while others want to be healthier and happier. Each person has a unique way of starting the inner work this requires. If you’re a writer who wants to manifest your writing hopes and dreams from the practical and pragmatic to the esoteric and spiritual, or who would like to clear any subconscious self-sabotage you may be experiencing, why not work with me? To find out more head over to my website by clicking the button below.
Missing in Action
This new section of the weekly newsletter is dedicated to all the words removed from dictionaries over the years. Words that define and describe our world, but which are deemed no longer necessary.
This edition is dedicated to the word Frutescent which is no longer included in any Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary 1.
The Weekly Soulshine
Something to do …
if you happen to be in West Dorset this weekend. The village I live in, Portesham, is hosting an Open Gardens Weekend on Saturday 15th and Sunday 15th June. Gardens are open between 2 pm and 5 pm, and my teeny tiny garden will be one of them. Tea, coffee and cake are available in the village hall too. You can find out more about all the activities in the village on our Millenium website here: https://map24.org/
The Weekly Writing Competition
This week’s contest is the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest for deliberately bad opening lines to novels. Think ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. The deadline is the 30th of June with a maximum of around 60 words. You can read more about the competition here: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/submit
With love, light, and laughter
Linda
x
When your journey leads up ahead but you’ve forgotten the destination and even the start point has vanished from view, do you continue to follow the white stones along the centre of the path or take the beaten earth trail between the tall trees? Does it even matter? Is it always necessary to think and plan ahead?
Maybe for once why don’t you let the path be a path? Don’t try to analyse. Don’t give in to thought. Just enjoy the journey.
How would we survive without thought.
Winston Churchill said something like. "Success comes from being able to go from one failure to the next without losing faith."
Thinking along those lines. Maybe the whole world is an accident.
Maybe somewhere at the beginning of time, there are two people with black faces shaking their heads and saying. "Maybe we shouldn't have struck that match. That was a much bigger bang than I expected."
The fact is that humankind generally learns by our mistakes. But we make so many of them! Every so often though, a Maverick thought pushes us ahead. You have to ask yourself where that thought comes from. Maybe all human thought forms part of a super computer, and every so often it coughs out something sensible, to help us survive. I personally, don't believe in any religions. I feel they cause too much fighting. I do believe however, that there is something more powerful than any one of us can dream of, ready to help the world if we are worthy or snuff us out if it gets fed up with our lack of working together.
I think the final test is not far off. We are so dependant on fossil fuel and there isn't enough for all of us. So we need a maverick idea to solve the problem. Has it already been solved and is it being sat on by the fuel companies?