In the past week, two blog posts have asked the question: “When do you do your best thinking?” Gabriele Girelli pitched the question on his blog, and his place is the shower. David at Forking Mad responded in the same way: the shower.

I remember, for the longest time, the shower would be where I did most of my thinking as well. I’m not sure what happened, but shower thoughts these days tend to fall right out of my head. By the time I leave the shower, I’ve lost them. Instead, most of my thinking comes in two other forms.

I think a lot when I move: it doesn’t matter if I’m walking, running, or bicycling. The very act of movement allows my mind to drift, and I put the pieces together to come up with my own ideas. There is something about the process of movement that allows neurons to fire in new ways, at least for me. It draws out connections that might have not otherwise been there. Is it the different stimulus? Is it the repetition of a single set of motions? I’m not sure, but it makes a big difference to me.

The other time is when I begin to write. Although I can write on the computer, I find that my ideas are far more original when I use traditional pen and paper. When I begin to write, I have no idea where my ideas will take me. They seem to come out of a place unknown to me: perhaps this is what the Hellenes referred to when they said that creativity was given to them by the Muses, and what early Christian thinkers referred to as “spirit.”

For the longest time, I thought that serious thinking required developing wholly original ideas. I’ve found instead that good ideas come out of synthesizing many different perspectives: two ideas are compared, played with, and brought together. I attempt to release the limitations of both ideas while including their strengths.

I think a lot of my ideas also emerge in conversing with others. It is unclear to me whether it is the process of talking that creates< the idea, or if it allows me to define an idea that I never even knew I had. One way or another, it is important to me.

What about you, where do you do your thinking? What does your process look like?