Thinking

 

Our being passes the whole of life thinking. We never cease from thinking, even in our most unthinking moments. Sleep and dream too seem to be thinking, a quiet combustible time we pass so much of our waking time trying to understand, in retrospect. We have access while thinking to all known created being, from the tiniest periwinkle to the vastest supernova. We can think about them all, though not all at once. Indeed, our thinking can only think so much at once, such that part of thinking seems to be putting a hold on thinking; self-regulation, in fact. Active awareness includes judgement, synthesis, decision, so many silent and formidable processes, yet instrumental as these are in being, they are still not everything that is thinking. Our senses colour in our thinking, while supplying a lifetime of sound effects to modify the effects. For some of us, it’s all too much. We would sometimes like thinking to cease, if only for a few hours or years. Opiates, addictions, movie marathons, and other remedies to the persistence of thinking are easily available, though they don’t stop us thinking. Reality meets us coming around the corner, one more thing to think about, only slow it down. Others cannot have enough, unceasing as they are in their pursuit of lifelong thinking. The language continues to evolve that might invent enough vocabulary for thinking, maybe. We walk around our highly tempered language like an actor, as stuff keeps happening. The next invasion, for example, is always possible and when it happens we take on the changes. The imagination expands the daily or yearly givens into possibilities that only thinking can do. The outside will offer mysteries that we must understand inside: sunlight or a falling leaf or a thunderbolt. Which leaves us with Thomas Traherne, or rather his saying: “As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.” [Centuries of Meditations’ I 8] Our thinking will continue, regardless of what he is saying, but what is he saying? That we live thinking, we don’t have to do anything about it. That we are conscious of how our thinking can take us anywhere anytime, but that to go where we think well requires a choice. We train ourselves in the way of thinking well, as if there is indeed a correct way. We can do this more and more, with practice, as we know that thinking well is true. It is simply learning to think in that way and not another. We can ask for something outside of ourselves to assist in overcoming the difficulty of thinking well. This way of thinking can be prayer, a whole mode of existence, a vast improvement. It is as easy and difficult as thinking well.