The Way Our Minds Work

John is writing again. Specifically poems in his William Tell series. (Ask him to read you a few. He gets so animated and excited.) It's clearly something that he loves doing. And it makes me happy that he's doing something he loves.

John was writing on his flight out to TX (a house hunting trip) and noticed a gentleman across the aisle doing sudoku. He looked at his notebook and had an epiphany about how he and I think.

When creating, the blank pages we use are different. John writes organically. He gets a hint of an idea, pulls out a blank piece of paper, and writes. No planning. No structure. He just writes. My mind works differently. I start with some sort of structure. Like the sudoku page.

Why? Obviously, John is very much a creative thinker and my mind is intensely logical. But there is more than that. We create in ways that feel right. That are comforting. For John, that means freedom to let things go anywhere they want. Too much structure unnerves him a little b/c he worries it won't come out right. I'm afraid of the blank page. I need to know that if I use the structure and follow the process, it'll come out "right".

Somehow this works for us. We make well thought out decisions because we're able to think about things from different angles. We're good at different things, so (as much as we can) we divide up chores, child care, and the like so that we're playing to our strengths. But I don't think we've ever realized it before. It's funny to think about how differently our minds work.