Marinating Thoughts

3 minute-read • 463 words

I think it’s important to have marinating thoughts. I’m not sure if that’s an existing term, so to define it: “marinating thoughts” are thoughts of your mind that occur when you dedicate time to let yourself sit down quietly and allow your mind… to marinate. No phones, no gadgets, no music, no socializing, nothing – just you and your thoughts.

A lot of people will do anything they can to avoid being alone with their thoughts – heck, sometimes I do it without realizing! Social media and the internet as a whole haven’t really helped in recent years. But the reason marinating thoughts – or as Bob Iger put it, “thinking creatively” – is crucial is because that’s what we do best as humans: using our brains. When we go through our day, we hop from one activity to another, from classes, to work, to assignments. Or maybe, from meeting to meeting to meeting. We don’t really get time to think for ourselves anymore. We just do things.

Let’s take Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, for example (I know this is the 29358th time I’ve used him as an example): he claims to wake up 4 AM every single day, mostly out of habit, but it has given him a period of a few hours for himself every morning. It helps him “think creatively” and plan ahead for the day.

What Bob wrote made perfect sense to me and really validated my idea of “daily me time” before going to bed, which is not doing anything and just sitting alone with my thoughts to reflect on that day and reorganize my mental (or actual) todo list for the following day and week. It’s helped tremendously with my time management but also with making sure my priorities are aligned with my goals. The reflection helps too, because that’s where new ideas pop up. This entire blog, for one, is a result of that. I’ve found that this blog serves as a good platform for me to lay out my thoughts, ideas and anything new I learn going about my life.

What happens if I get tired? Oh I do, certainly – but that’s what makes the marinating space so beautiful. I cherish coming home after a long day of classes and committee meetings, finishing my assignments and getting time to just sit with my thoughts. I’m not sure if this enjoyment is just an introvert thing or not (presumably since extroverts recharge by socializing, they may or may not suck the soul out of themselves by being in a quiet room of one person) but regardless where on the introversion spectrum you stand, I implore you to fit a ‘marinating space’ in your schedule. Nobody is too busy for that – not even Bob Iger.