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LINGERING
SHOWERS BRING BRAIN POWERS
I
used to be able to take a five-minute shower.
With dressing, blow-drying and a quick hit of makeup, I could be
ready to go out the door in twenty minutes flat.
But
somehow during the last five years, I’ve discovered the long shower.
The first forty-five minutes, I go so far away, I don’t even
realize I’m gone. The
last fifteen minutes or so, I spend trying to get myself to get out, dry
off and get ready.
Except
for a brief period right after Psycho was released and shower use
declined, millions of other people, too, have lingered in the shower,
and now I know why. Because it’s not only a good place to think,
it’s a good place to think better.
In
spite of naysayers’ claims that a long shower wastes time and water, I
like to shower for an hour because I know the full-body faucet gives me
thinking bang for my buck, and I have experts (well, one expert) to back
me up.
Not
long ago, I was listening to Jeff Taylor, CEO of Monster.com, speak at
the Phoenix Online University graduation ceremony.
What made this speech different from the rest of the graduation
addresses that tell all graduates to go out and set the world on fire,
when ninety-nine percent of them will be tending not setting the fires,
was a list of practical tips about life, one of which was “don’t let
anyone tell you how long to shower.”
Listening
to that, I was suddenly validated, and I started to clap a slow clap.
He
said it is when you are deep into that shower experience that the ideas
come. When he said some of the best thinking in the world goes on in the
shower, I was standing, whistling and chanting, Shower! Shower, Shower!
That he was delivering his speech via satellite didn’t stop me
from cheering him on. That
I seemed to be the only one in the vast audience who took the showering
tip as the high point of the speech didn’t deter me.
What
he said was true. Some of
the best thinking has, indeed, happened since the invention of the
original think-tank.
You
might argue that not all thinking done in the shower results in new,
good ideas. Of course,
“it’s a wash,” “scrubbing an idea,” and “feeling drained”
were probably coined after some unproductive shower time, but it’s
shower head, not shower foot or shower fingertip, and that should give
us a clue about what the inventor was up to.
So,
I’m sticking to the dream stream.
It’s my time away, my time to think, and whatever I do, I
don’t let anyone tell me how long to shower.
Even
when my skin has become the texture of cold oatmeal, even when the fog
from my shower rises like a nuclear cloud above my head, even when I
know I’ve spent a whole hour in the shower thinking, I justify it by
believing the idea for the next Q-Tip, Velcro, or Magnetic Poetry could
originate out of my steam of unconsciousness
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