Thursday, April 7, 2016

Can't Save Spiritual Impressions

I've discovered something interesting: I can't save my progress halfway through writing a blog post. In most games and processes, you can hit certain milestones where you can save your progress and start from that point later. For example, when you're doing research, you can save the location of good information, which will make it that much easier to find that information again if you have to pause and resume your search. If you're writing an essay, you can write down some brainstorming and maybe an outline and then build on those ideas later. But this is not an academic blog. This is a spiritual blog. And spiritual impressions are much harder, if not impossible, to save.

This morning, I started to blog about Elder Koichi Aoyagi's Conference-ending talk, Hold on Thy Way. I copied some important quotes and started to write an introduction, but that's as far as I got this morning, so I saved what I had written, trusting that I would be able to resume blogging when I got back from school. But I've found that, whether it's the penalty of procrastination, or whether it's that the waters of my mind have been muddied by the events of the day and need time to settle before they can clear, I just don't have the same spirit with me right now that I had this morning. So, even with the notes I left myself, I can't quite get myself into the mindset I know I was in when I first read that talk.

What this means for me is that, in the future, I will have to commit to blogging about a Conference talk as soon as I review it. If I don't have time to blog about it, reading it ahead of time probably won't help me, and if I do choose to read the talk at a certain time, I need to make sure I'll have enough time to blog about it, because quitting halfway through a blog post and trying to return to it later doesn't work out as well as I would have thought.

The spiritual interpretation of this message is that the Spirit works on His own timetable, not on ours. We can't put spiritual impressions on hold until a more convenient time, so we need to follow them while they're still fresh. Tomorrow morning, I hope that my mind will be fresh enough to gain new insights into Elder Aoyagi's talk, or to gain the same insights again, but I know now that it would have been much better if I had blogged about my first impressions of Elder Aoyagi's talk before I lost left.

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