There I was with little children flashing behind me as I tried to read a short story on my phone and occasionally look up to find my children. It felt a little weird to take time amidst the chaos of a weekend day at a trampoline park to read Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, but it also felt very right.
It wasn’t reading the story or anything like that that sparked the idea in my mind or drew out the memory is more accurate. I had seen it done before but there I was proving it to myself. The constant drone of steady noise is the same as silence. We can concentrate when the noise is steady. It is when the noise is isolated that our brains react.
For instance, say you are sitting at your computer trying to finish building a webpage that you aren’t even sure you should be building and suddenly your daughter is screaming behind you. It is a new variable to the environment. That is a lot different than being in a place with a consistent steady drone of noise. Even if one is louder than the other. Though I am not sure much is louder than Abigail, especially when she wants chocolate milk.
The idea that came to me or resurfaced after reading a short story while children darted around me was that this is the solution to the summer work stress. I can take my three concentrated work days and compress them into two for the summer. Try and get more done on each day, leave a mid-week day for the beach or Busch Gardens, and have a way to still get everything I need to get done done during the summer.
Sky Zone, however, is not that solution. With three kids the memberships would run close to $105 dollars a month and that isn’t something we want to do. Chuck E Cheese sells a membership for $11.99 and it can be used as a family membership. I could cart at least two of the kids there and have them play while I worked and if I needed a break I could go and play some skee ball or pop a shot in the middle of what I’m doing.
Hopefully by summer my nervous system will have calmed and I will have stopped tinkering with everything, but who knows I might find 15 other projects to work on or finally flesh out the two book outlines I have in my external memory palace. In other words there are 24 hours in a day and I should use them.
David Huzzard Writes 