Spoiler alert, I am big on analogies. When thinking about ways to give your thoughts space to explore, I kept coming back to a garden. So here we go, we’re going to garden our thoughts as we give them space, plant seeds, fertilize them, cultivate them, and hopefully harvest them into something fruitful. Plus my son gets annoyed by puns, so I may secretly hope this focus on analogous thinking really grows on him. If it is safe for me to assume we are all in alignment with the fact we’re going to think too much about too many things all at the same time, let’s take a moment to focus on some ways and places we can give these thoughts the space and nutrients to bloom into something fruitful. Like any great feat, there needs to be an arena built for great things to happen. Football teams have stadiums, sprinters have tracks, and swimmers have lanes defined in pools built for their individual success. While we’ve already touched on the fact thoughts hit us from any number of angles at any number of times, we can prepare a space for them to live outside of our skulls. A place where they can continue without distraction, and can be captured for future exploration. I’ve found that by intentionally making the most of my thinking through dedicated arenas and times, I can limit the intrusive thoughts during times which prove distracting. Ironically, I’m not going to give you an exhaustive list of places and ‘ways you can cultivate your own thoughts, but I am going to share the four ways and places I most often garden and fertilize my thinking.

Like any successful garden, the first step is location. Our garden should have plenty of space for future growth, there should be plenty of sunlight, and it should be free of pests. For me, my primary thought garden lies within the binding of a journal. Since I have always enjoyed writing, and even more specifically, handwriting, journaling was a natural place for me to land. By writing my thoughts out in ink, on paper, I don’t have a delete option, and I find myself truly writing what I mean because I might not have an eloquent way of articulating because I’m a terrible speller. I also have some obsessive compulsive tendencies which prevent me from comfortably scratching out an error, so I find myself expanding entries to explain something that doesn’t make sense, or is misspelled. These little tangential thoughts which creep into my mind, are jotted down in a true stream of consciousness kind of way that offers a peek into my brain, but also helps me to follow the thought to completion without censor.

Over the years I’ve tried several guided journals to help be build my practice, and they’ve helped me to create my own simple guide to journaling. I simply start out asking myself a series of questions:

• How do you feel?
• What are you grateful for?
• What went well today/yesterday?
• What went to shit today/yesterday?
• What are you going to do differently?
• What are you going to explore changing?
• What excited you today/yesterday?

These questions have become a sort of fertilizer for my practice and I’ve found that through asking myself these questions, I come up with a handful of answers around what I can do to improve my situation, become aware of my successes and failures, and I’ve uncovered areas of intersection between my life and my work. It also helps me track back to causes of anxiety or stress as most often in my world they are not singular catalysts, but rather the culmination of many small things going to shit over a longer period of time.

Separate gardens of thought also enable me to focus my ideation through a given perspective and empower myself to explore thoughts more completely. Of course there are times I start writing in my professional journal just to open up my personal one to capture something I want to dive deeper into later, but I really try my best to keep these tracks separated. While the questions I ask of myself help me shape entries, I often find myself starting entries with some tangential thought which caused me to lose sleep, or popped up in the shower, or during exercise or meditation. I do not edit my journal entries, but rather let my thoughts go crazy, only shifting the location as the topic deviates from personal to professional life. This has helped me look back at my entries to identify intersections of thought as well as intersections in action, while ensuring the perspective is aligned with the role most relevant. The important part of gardening our thoughts is to let them grow, so don’t be too restrictive with your practice, especially at the start.