Thoughts About ThinkingThinking is for Youby Gerald Angelo Cirrincione
Thinking is weightless, silent, invisible, temperature-less, tasteless, and odorless. It is extraordinarily convenient. It can be done at any time of day or night. Every situation is an opportunity to practice thinking. Thinking requires no special materials, equipment, or clothing. Thinking needs no particular kind of place. Consider this story. One afternoon, two Athenian brothers were quarreling over whether to hear Socrates or see a traveling circus. They couldn't agree. The younger brother went to the circus, and the older brother attended Socrates' dialogue with Meno. The brother at the circus, however, spent the afternoon preoccupied with Socratic questions, while the brother with Socrates spent the afternoon daydreaming about clowns and jugglers. Which brother was more of a thinker? Thinking doesn't need the presence of a Socrates. Since thinking isn't a contest or a collaboration, it doesn't require the participation of anybody else. Thinking is a portable activity of one human mind. It is your personal choice whether to keep your thoughts private or to communicate them to others. Your thoughts are your possessions. If you were stripped naked and put into solitary confinement by a tyrant you would still have your ideas and your thinking. Thoughts are gifts that can be given away, or products that can be sold for a price. Thinking is for everybody. You need nobody's permission or approval to think. There are no prerequisites for thinking. It doesn't cost any money. It requires no schooling, licenses, titles, degrees, or certificates. Just a purpose. The purposes of thinking are two-fold: to solve and to explore. Both are important. First let's discuss solving. People solve problems, confusions, dilemmas, mysteries, puzzles, riddles, and secrets. As a purpose, solving is somewhat reactive. It implies clearing up some concern that has been hanging around for a while. You do this either by answering some nagging or tantalizing question, or by critiquing or refuting a previous answer. Solving is oriented toward the past: it completes. It needs an apt question to get started. A good question is priceless. All your difficulties arise from a problem in thinking. Outlining the solution involves either a re-thinking or, more likely, a thinking through for the first time. Relate your problem back to the thinking that caused it, and then revise this thinking. Now let's discuss exploring. When exploring is your purpose, you have nothing in particular that you are trying to solve and yet you still want to look, listen, and consider. Here the emphasis may be so different that it may seem that there is no emphasis at all. You aren't focused on any particular question. Your interest is unhurried and expansive. There isn't any urgency. You are drawn to the new and unfamiliar. You may not know what you want to do, what you are doing, or why. You may just wander around, paying attention to whatever is interesting. Curiosity and fascination guide you. Exploring is looking for something that hasn't been specifically asked for. It notices something that has been overlooked. It has an element of surprise. You spontaneously notice a pattern or unexpectedly get a idea; you see things differently. Exploring is oriented toward the future; it begins. Innovation involves new thinking. I have said once before that thinking is simply looking, listening, and considering. Your earliest memories as a child will include looking, listening and considering. Thinking has an active phase (looking and listening), and a passive phase (considering). In the looking-and-listening phase of thinking, you pay attention to your senses, collect data, examine evidence, gather raw information, hunt for facts, take measurements, compile statistics, conduct interviews, hear testimony, have new experiences, do experiments, read the ideas of others. In the considering phase of thinking, you ponder all that you have seen and heard. You mentally process this raw data, holding it in your individual awareness, reviewing it. With the use of analogy and analysis, you examine the data by allowing it to gently shake up your thinking. Here you are navigating between the twin dangers of paralyzing confusion and hasty conclusion. While considering, you might turn things upside down, rearrange the pieces, question premises, get goofy, take a long walk. Suppose what seems most certain were not the case; then what? How would this look to a Martian, or a Neanderthal, or Don Quixote? If thinking is the first step in any creation or solution, if thought is the beginning of any human action, then what is the very beginning of a thought? What is the smallest particle of an idea, the softest of the software? The faintest, subtlest whisper of a thought is: An Inkling . . . A Hunch . . . A Glimmer . . . Pay attention to these. Learn to notice them as they fly across your mind. They are tiny seeds. Let them grow. Love thinking. Why? Thinking brings understanding and builds the road from a question to its answer, from a problem to its solution. Thinking clears up mysteries. Thinking brings you the possibility of newness so that you will not stagnate. Novel, original, and unique things come to you from thinking. Thinking keeps you contemporary and in tune with new developments, as well as helping you understand and appreciate the past. Nothing can be more fun than thinking. Thinking is entertaining, exciting, and sexy. An active thinker is always looking for new points of view - alert to opportunities to change perspectives. Thinking need never be stuffy or dry or boring. It isn't pompous, needs no ceremony, and shouldn't call attention to itself. It isn't confined to an ivory tower. Thinking completes you as a human being. Thinking is the penthouse and observation deck on the skyscraper of human nature. You have one powerful resource: the capacity to think. Every improvement that you have made in your life or in your profession began with good thinking. Human life on earth has been and will continue to be transformed by both artistic and scientific thinking. Literature, painting, music, and theater are the fruits of creative thinking. Tools and technologies depend on thinking to devise them and manage their use. Obsolescence is the result of sluggish thinking. Thinking is its own compensation. By wrestling with an idea, any idea, even a wrong one, you can learn what grains of truth are in it and stimulate new thoughts in yourself. Renew your thinking, and then you can renew your life.
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