Time for another visit to the peaceful moment. Lately, things have been very hectic for my friends and sometimes I feel the pressure to make everything better. The truth is, I can only make things better for me. I can be a sympathetic ear, but sometimes I have to revisit what’s inside my own head and simply be a good listener and hope the best for others.

I recently read Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance and A Better World. I was blown away with the second book and his thought process. There were so many things that he wrote and said so much better than I could have. I want to understand how he wrote it and continue to pursue excellence in my work. I put up a review on Amazon to thank him and here was my favorite quote:

“Cooper had a theory about personality. Most people considered personality to be a singular identity….But he tended to see people as more of a chorus. Every stage in life added a voice to that chorus….What marked the difference between healthy people and broken ones…[was that] the inappropriate voices held an inappropriate number of spaces.”

 I didn’t put these up in the review, but they were awesome quotes:

“Everything in life comes down to intentions and results.”

And, finally:

“The world works because people agreed to believe it worked.”

This sums up where I am at in my world today. Instead of the chorus, I think of my working brain as how someone would see it when it comes out of a 3D printer. I look at how my thought process was shaped through the layers of my life. I divided it into two big layers with many, many sub-layers:

LIFE and WORK (The past layer of my life):

My adult thought process was shaped through my work. I learned to organize thoughts and understand the patterns and layers. I looked for the patterns and thus observed the predictive behaviors that would occur in a criminal’s mind or an event. I layered my thoughts like a 3D printer, filling in details as they come to me. I looked for the missing pieces of the puzzle, looked for the reasoning behind the intention and then kept filling in the details until I got results, which included profiling and aiding in the arrests of criminals. I continue to draw from my past to create the present.

WRITING (the present layer of my life):

The present layer of my life has had many false starts. I erase the thoughts that don’t fit, I start over; the story dies; and then I rebuild it, sometimes going in a totally different direction. If it gets covered in too much snow, as many gardens do in the spring in Colorado, I can hope that the layers of mulch and love have protected the plants, like the layers of thoughts overlap to protect my story. And, if it truly dies, I will rebuild. My words can change many times through cutting and rewriting, until finally, the layering is right and the story unfolds. And, by choosing the sub-layer of Mystery, I am in my element and the characters’ layers reflect their personal mysteries, a group mystery, a big picture, and any impending doom. So, if the world stops working because people no longer agree or believe that the system doesn’t work, then it’s time to prepare for doomsday. And, as a writer, I’ve prepared for this over and over again. Thanks Mr. Sakey for your insight. It helps me keep going.