Intervals

I was going to write something but instead I'll pause.

I will break the silence with a song about nothing, thus continuing the interval in a diffferent way. Here is a piece of doggerel learned many years ago.

Nothing nothing nothing nothing
I sing nothing all day long
I sing absolutely nothing
How d'ya like my nothing song?

After a hectic two days in Spanish City it's good to get home, ahead of a winter storm no less, and have some "nothing time" or downtime. For me, downtime is up time. It restores, renews, and refreshes. Sometimes we pay a lot of attention to what's in front of us and less to what is in between what's in front of us. We all need intervals to process, absorb, and think. After God created the world in six days, God rested on the seventh. That period of nothing is called Sabbath to us Jesus-loving folks. As the old saying goes, sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits. One company had a guy sitting and thinking and staring out the window. A recently hired efficiency expert saw this and insisted, "Get rid of him! He's doing nothing!" His companion answered, "The last time he did nothing, he figured out how to save our company a million dollars."

Great ideas, like plants, take time to germinate. Speech would be meaningless without taking a breath in between sentences. Those who fail to do so risk being diagnosed with verbal diarrhea. I have seen a few cases of that. Music needs its rests in between notes or it is just noise. Even my caterer friend tells me that the secret to great food is taking a few initial steps with it, such as spreading the first layer on a sandwich, then leaving it for a few hours before doing anything else.

I take a rest
A rest is blessed
And I suggest it's often best.
You may have guessed
What I've confessed
So put my statement to the test.

One wag even saw fit to commemorate such a downtime interval with a historical marker. "On January 27, 1869, right here, nothing happened."

I'll end here so you can go take a break.