Wondering what a thought cloud is? Set a timer for 60 seconds and write down every thought that goes through your mind without censoring it. Phrases, single words, repetitive grunts, random thoughts, brain farts…. write it all down. When the bell goes off, draw a big circle around the words. There it is: your thought cloud for that minute.
It’s pretty daunting really if you consider how many unconscious thought clouds we humans generate in a day. The highly-charged worry and fear-based ones are the clouds that that don’t evaporate as easily. They just get bigger and darker.
The idea for my one-minute thought-cloud exercise came from a Web site I discovered recently called “Tweet Cloud.” It generates clouds out of the words you’ve used the most on Twitter during a selected period of time. With a lovely calligraphed collage of your best (and worst) 140-character thought-bits you receive immediate feedback of what you’ve been putting out in the world. Like those Tag Clouds you see on some blog sites, the greater the frequency, the larger the word. Here’s mine [along with a rather imposing weight-loss Google Ad, which you can hide by reducing the page size]: @SpaciousSelf.
The words themselves [no cloud]:
