What we have been encouraging you, and I guess some of you aren't clear on this, is that when you start the sitting or the standing, it is helpful to go through a short form Five Reflections, one or two Compassion and Lovingkindness wishes, like for me and for the world, and then to choose one topic for the rest of the period. Open it up and stay with that one topic.
The short form that was printed on the back of the paper that you got at registration, was the example Rosemary uses in the ten day retreat on day 8, but it can be even shorter than that, it can be just one sentence for each one. But it should be words that mean something to you, and you want to keep them basically the same, you might have one or two variations, but you want to keep them basically the same, and just short form, always go through it, always go through it.
Now sometimes it stimulates more thought while you are doing the short form, but we encourage you don't open it up at that time. Use that later if you want, after you are done with the short form. If you do the short form, then finish and say, "Oh, I'm now going to do all five," like five or ten minutes each, okay that's a decision and that's fine too, you can do it that way. But you might get lost and you might not finish the five, so in general it would be better, or should we say easier, just to choose one subject.
Now as to if the thought, "if no more ideas arise to reflect on" comes into your mind, then maybe you're not working enough. Maybe you want to walk around the elephant some more as to your reflection. Because basically it is possible to stimulate the mind to keep thinking, even if you go over some things you thought of last month in the same topic. Now we have mentioned systems, and that is one way to stimulate more thinking. Perhaps you were doing a system on the alphabet and you got to Z already, you could do it all over again, you could do it straight from A again, or you could change to another system, but stay with your theme, keep that the same. Because if you feel, "Oh I've got no more thoughts to reflect on," then normally that's just going to be boredom, just going to be restlessness, you are going to want something else more exciting, or whatever, and you really don't want to encourage that.