Some Thoughts

            Well, here we are again, you reader, you. What are we, reader? What are you? What am I? How do you answer a question like that? Well, as a first pass I for one could answer that question by saying that I’m Geofrey Crow. But that’s a pretty empty answer, now isn’t it? It’s something like being asked what a car is and being told it’s a Ford: in a grammatical sense it answers the question, but in a deeper sense it doesn’t answer the question at all, because it only invites the question of what a Ford is.

            Now, common sense tells us it’s better not to ask this kind of question. What possible good could come from looking too deeply into what we are? After all, we know what we are, we’re people who do things and go places and have experiences in the world. Isn’t that enough? What good could come of convincing ourselves that we don’t know what we are?

            Like most questions, this is an extremely dangerous one if you take it seriously. Thinking is an infinitely dangerous process, which is one reason that so many of us—naturally, myself included—spend such inordinate amounts of time trying to avoid it. There’s a very real possibility that if we think too hard, we might think ourselves up into a cloud and never know how to get ourselves down, or we’ll think ourselves down into the midnight valley with sharp rocks and howling wolves. Thinking, real thinking, is full of the most inviting little snares and traps, unmapped minefields of the mind, incredible temptations, boxes that spring shut, boxes only death can pry open.

            In short, thinking, like anything else in life, is a mistake. But thinking, like all the other mistakes, can be turned into a good if it’s pursued stupidly enough, unthinkingly enough.

            But what should we think about? But what is thinking in the first place? But don’t we all already do plenty of thinking without learning how?

            Certainly we all have thoughts. Certainly we are all constantly bombarded by thoughts, usually incoherent, fragmentary, and self-contradictory. We all have the raw material for thinking in plenty; but how many of us actually think? Any activity, any habit, any sustained practice or exercise, gradually seeps or grows to affect every other aspect of our lives; no matter how hard we try to break ourselves into pieces, to distract ourselves from the bad (or good) in us, we can never succeed at keeping the pieces separate. There’s an inescapable, tendentious flow at the very heart of us, some disappearing point from which the whole pageant of life arises and into which it returns. We can’t escape thinking, just as we can’t escape breathing. But the fact that we all think no more makes us all thinkers than the fact that we breathe makes us all marathon runners.

            Let’s try this, reader: do you think it’s possible that the conviction that we already know what thinking is could actually prevent us from learning how to think? Someone who’s never run a mile could certainly convince themselves that they could easily run a marathon; and if they were certain enough that it was all that easy, they’d never be proven wrong.

            So what I’m trying to suggest is this: what if thinking were just another muscle, another human capacity to be exercised, with the added oddity that those of us who are most convinced we can do it well are the ones who are least capable of doing it at all? Without a doubt, thinking wouldn’t be the only human activity to suffer from this sort of self-camouflage.

            For one thing, it seems possible that we usually think of thinking as something that we do alone, in the quiet of our own minds. But what if the only way to really think were to engage in debate, or at least some kind of discourse, with other people? Don’t we learn so much more about what we really think when someone else is there to challenge us, to point out the flaws in our thoughts and suggest ways that they could possibly be refined? What if thinking wasn’t something that’s present so much in any one thought as in the continual effort of teasing out our thoughts and beliefs, the discipline of unravelling what we already believe and helping others to do the same? Well, what do you think, reader? Is thinking all in your head, or is it something that occurs between us?