There is a time and place for us to sit and think about all the things that can be thought about, no longer concerned with our external perception but instead thinking and understanding ideas or feelings. I’m in support of this, I think we should think. Thinking about complex issues we’re experiencing, or our interactions with people, what we should do later, what we should do now, what we can do, what must be done, what we keep pushing off… and I could go on. There are so many things we could think about! We could be completely lost in our mind for seemingly forever, however, I would say there’s a time and place for this, but not all times and places are the same nor is our ability to identify the right time and place.
I used to spend a lot of time thinking. Whether it be fantasizing, or day-dreaming, or trying to understand a complex problem presented before me or from within me, these would all require thinking. In those times, I thought that was the right thing to do, to think, to focus on those thoughts and then attempt to grasp an understanding from that time spent thinking. This made sense for many of the things I was thinking or attempting to understand. Easy examples would be complex ideas presented in an essay or book I’d be reading, if I didn’t understand immediately, I would have to sit on it for a while, and then keep thinking about it. After enough thinking, I would reach a conclusion, a point in which I felt like I understood, and then moved on to the next thing to learn, understand, and think about.
I’ve had problems in my life which have required action. Had, because they not the same problems I have now, but those problems would never have been solved if I had not committed myself to actually doing something other than think. The most prominent, and consistently mentioned, is the action of removing myself from an environment that was causing me harm. The action was the only thing that ceased or eliminated the harm caused by the environment, if I had not removed myself from that environment, I would have never been able to eliminate the pain, but because I did something about it, I experienced beneficial change. Yet, before the action, I spent years thinking. When anyone thinks about anything, the idea of doing a specific thing for years, probably ends up being considered something of a large scale. Despite it being years of thinking, how I wanted to leave, how terrible I felt, why I felt that way; it didn’t actually lead to action, which was the only solution to the problem. In fact, by thinking, and only thinking, I began to mentally dodge myself, trying to make myself believe that I was the problem, or trying to push away the problem, acting like it isn’t one, and so on.
What I would like to focus on is an analyzation of when we should be purely thinking, purely acting, both thinking and acting, and some gray area that I believe is worth mentioning. There really is a time and place for all of these, but I’d like to imagine, there are many who either sit on their hands thinking about what needs to be done, whilst never actually doing the thing they believe needs doing. With black, there is also white, and so we have those who commit actions while never in a conscious state of why they’re committing the action, which can harm them upon committing the action or at a later date. This will also be a display of many of the values I have, but I think because I have both been in a state with and without them, and have been happier with the introduction of them, spreading them might help those who are currently in a state that I was in before.
Thinking takes place inside of your head. It might sound silly to literally note that, but it does. Thoughts that escape that landscape are no longer thoughts, but things, things that have escaped the internal. Words on a page must have come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the mind. Instead of writing, I could have equally chosen to only think, and allowed those thoughts to build upon each other, without any external result of all that thinking. Thinking on-and-on, about, anything, jumping from one thought to another, or focusing on one specific thing for hours on end. For the purposes in which you are thinking will vary from person to person. Similarly, the benefits for which you will reap the thinking will vary from person to person. Believe it or not, with something like thought, there’s a large amount of variability in the things that could be joggin’ your noggin’. With all this variability, how are we going to decide what thoughts should stay and be inspected, dissected, analyzed, and then analyzed again? At what point do we decide that thinking is not longer beneficial?
Things that require further thinking and understanding, things of a higher complexity, are one’s that have a tendency to stick around for a while. These don’t actually need to be our own thoughts initially, but as a result of becoming a part of that thing, whatever it is, we will introduce many thoughts in reaction to that thing. The complexity will differ from person to person, where they are in life, and their capabilities for comprehending varying levels of depth. Complexity is subjective; therefore, it doesn’t actually matter whether or not the thing you consider complex is simple for someone else. My focus is on the thoughts used to understand the thing.
One of the easiest instances that I could think of where I would spend time understanding and digesting a thing purely within my mind are abstract ideas. Abstraction allows for the greatest amount of variability in how I perceive or understand, whatever the thing is. Let’s take a universal rule for example, like the cyclicity of all things. Things live, die, and things come as a result of death, and that is life, which leads to death again, and so on. I don’t have to use the terms “life” or “death,” I could say all things have a beginning and ending, but I think you understand the basic idea being presented. This is something I can observe happening, I’m around long enough to see the cyclic nature of the universe. Now that I have this very limited understanding, I can do a lot with it. I could hold onto this and focus on it for an extended period of time. Attempting to find all the things I have overlooked which are so obviously in a cycle, I can analyze the systems within my mind that are cyclic, and I can predict the cycles that will happen outside of my lifetime.
The reality is, I could go on forever thinking about cycles. I could continually think about this fundamental thing forever. Within the context of cycles, there will always be more things to observe, there will always be more to analyze, to dissect, and even after all of that, it will have been merely observation. This is okay, and I think this is okay, as long as it doesn’t eat up your life. The most dangerous question, in my opinion, would be “why?” Asking this simple question will have to be used carefully, and there is a clear limitation to its use, and at times, it might be difficult to notice when we’ve reached that point.
I could ask, “why do we breathe?” It’s a cycle, we inhale, and we exhale, to inhale again. Pretty simple. But there’s a dark secret, I’m human, so I want to know why I’m inhaling and exhaling. I can learn and understand that I require oxygen to function, and I receive oxygen from my inhalations, and my body uses oxygen to function, and I exhale carbon dioxide, the waste product after my body is done, and then I inhale again because I need more oxygen, and so on. Great, we’ve gone a little deeper. So, what is my body doing with the oxygen? Why is the waste product carbon dioxide? I’ll be honest, I don’t know! For me, I don’t really care, but there are those who do care, and have delved into finding the answers to these questions. I think that this is the good part of thinking. If we had never asked the questions, we wouldn’t have tried to find the answers, but obviously, to find the answers we have to measure things outside of our head. We couldn’t ask these questions and find the answers from within our little minds!
Furthermore, what I would describe as good could turn to bad. It’s great if you mentally took the path to understand why a thing was or is, but as with myself, and I imagine many others, we ask why the fundamental thing is there in the first place. An even darker secret is that there are limitations to our knowledge and understanding, and so understanding why all things are cyclic is basically impossible. If you’re inside a box, and the box is closed without holes, and you can’t poke holes through the box, nor leave the box, and so you can’t see outside of the box. This is the reality of our condition, and when we try to think about what’s outside the box, or why we’re in the box, or why the things in the box are the way they are, we could go on forever. I will never understand, nor do I believe anyone will understand, why things are cyclic. I could spend all day, all night, every moment, asking myself “why” and never receive an answer. This is the danger of over-thinking.
The thoughts that have no conclusive answers could endlessly be thought, and in my experience, this brings about anguish. If I focus on the fact that I won’t know, and I can’t know, and no matter how hard I try to know, I’ll never gain that ability, I’ll be upset, because I want to know things! Despite this, I juxtaposed the same question but with a different set of parameters. Instead of trying to understand the fundamental thing, I can acknowledge it as fundamental, and then go about trying to understand the things that exist within the idea of cyclicity. I could try to understand why all things come in cycles or I could try to understand a subsection of a particular topic and its reasons for the cyclic actions it commits. I think you’ve noticed something important here. In order to understand the thing in specific, we had to actually do things. We couldn’t do the experiments in our mind; the thinking itself did not result in our understanding. We reached conclusions by testing and analyzing from outside of our minds, because, we cannot perfectly simulate a reality we don’t know exists, internally. We can choose to shift ourselves from beings that think about fundamentals that cannot be understood to beings that think about specifics that can be understood.
This is an alteration of our thinking in reference to things we cannot understand. Unfortunately, some end up being caught in a thought-loop where they focus on the foundational thing rather than the results and realities that can be observed and measured as a result of that thing. But why? Why would someone end up doing this? It’s obviously foolish, but it’s done because it’s easier. To actually move your body, to think about how you’re going to test the thing you want to understand, or even reaching a baseline of knowledge in order to apprehend what knowledge has already been gathered. There was a first person who wanted to understand why we breathe, and that person didn’t have the tools and ability to understand in the same way that we do. We have schools, free information online, textbooks, and a lot of people. You aren’t starting from ground-zero in this world, and so you shouldn’t act like you are. I say this in the sense that you have the ability to do something with this need to understand, but you have to grow content with the abilities that you have. Understand what you can do, and avoid trying to understand what cannot be understood. Tread carefully as well, because there are things that might seem incomprehensible but are not, we are in the time where we have an unimaginable amount of room to grow in understanding of even simple things. Could you explain a computer to someone 100 years ago? 200?
Great, we can alter our thinking to ask questions that can be measured and understood rather than indefinitely wondering. What’s been described is best for things to do with logic, things that can be measured and repeated to find the same or similar result, and with those results, we can ask questions that apply to the layer beneath what we’ve uncovered. This is great; however, we are not purely logical beings. Tackling your mind in reference to emotions is a different beast but there are enough similarities that an overlap can be showcased, but the specific nuances to emotional thinking require their own, specific, care.
In the example I presented at the beginning, where I emotionally needed to change my environment but was unwilling; I was thinking various things, but the intent behind sharing that was to showcase the thinking was not beneficial. I was totally lost within my mind, and after enough playing around in my mind, I got lost. It’s not like I was writing things down, I was just thinking, and thinking can be messy and disgusting, from one place to the next, and then back again, and then somewhere totally unrelated, and then back again, rinsing and repeating that, over a long period of time, you can get lost pretty easily. I was so unsure of where I was that, like said, I began to think things that didn’t make sense, because I had lost confidence or certainty in thoughts that had once made sense. If I had written it down, I’d know of what really was or wasn’t, but I didn’t, and it caused me internal harm. Thinking one thing was the issue, then thinking something else was the issue, and going down on this eternal list of “could be” brought me no conclusion, no answer, no final understanding that would solve what I had forgotten needed to be solved.
Well, at one point, with the help of various variables, I did get back to what needed to be solved. Where did those things come from? The external world. Other people. I no longer was lost, but knew what had to be done, but it was exactly that, the fact something needed to be done, externally, that had been the thing that stopped me from solving the issue. It was only through actually doing something in the external world that had caused things to change, and that’s one of the most important takeaways in this particular example. How many issues do you have that you believe to be taking place internally, and you have convinced yourself they are within you, but they are actually from the outside? We take what’s outside of us into us, and when we think, we’re on the inside, and if we focus only on one side, we can only see one side, and so we’re blind to the other world. There are cases in which we can think internally and it can bring us a conclusion, we might not even have to write it down, but the conclusion we reach usually is one of contentment, because it’s over, we don’t have to think about it anymore.
The power of choice in thought enables us to either distinguish or extend thoughts. Suppose that I’m unfit, and I do twenty pushups. Physically I’m receiving many responses, one’s that are negative, but then come the thoughts. These thoughts can be either negative or positive, and can continue on for a very long time or a very short time, and we have the ability to choose how we handle our emotions. In this case, I could think that I’m a terrible person for becoming unfit, and leave it at that, and use the anger for fuel to do more exercise. Or, I could be proud of myself that I did anything at all, and the fact that I’m exercising is enough, which could also be used as fuel to do more exercise. These are two extremes, and there are all the feelings that come in-between, and the feelings being experienced are after the action has been committed, not before. In either of these cases, or any case, we can begin to ask questions like “How did I end up out of shape?” We can steadily go down the pipeline of finding out what occurred in order to find out how we ended up so unfit.
There are benefits to this, and there is a definite end, but I want to draw a mental line to when that actually must stop. We could spend so much time mentally racking our brains, finding out what led us to being so unfit, all the things that have happened to us, all the little social interactions, all the foods we’ve ever eaten and the foods we still eat, the types of people we hang out with, and so forth. It’s nearly indefinite. It’s the contentment with the answer in which you receive that decides whether or not you continue thinking. Chances are, those twenty pushups were agonizing, terrible, and why would you want to experience pain? No one likes pain, even if there is a clear benefit, or we have conditioned ourselves to believing there is. Thinking, we do it all the time, so thinking about what has caused the pushups to be so agonizing, will actually be easier than doing the pushups themselves. If you want to do the pushups, you have to do the pushups. Not think about doing pushups, not thinking about why you must do pushups, how you will do pushups, when you will do pushups, the benefits of pushups, all you need to do is act. Wiping clear the mind’s need to maximize energy and maintain homeostatic function, we can push ourselves farther than the previous iterations of ourselves, which enables us to become different people, who are more than what we once were. It is only through action that this is achieved. Thoughts can and will act as an impairing force to stop you from being someone else, and they are deceitful. Do what you must, and avoid thinking on doing the action, and begin actually doing it.
There are exceptions to all things, and sometimes they are relevant while at other times they are not. In this particular case, there are exceptions to simply committing the action. If I want to do something, I usually know quickly whether or not I should spend some time thinking about what I’m going to do. What the most important things to note are whether or not the action will harm you or another person. That’s usually the simplest and easiest check that I do before doing something I think I want to do. Even in the worst-case scenario, the things I do will only come at a cost of time, and I can set up a mental hierarchy of what should be done before and after other things, but I know that all the things I’m doing will cause no harm to anyone. That’s the most important check to me.
To others, that might not be the most important check. Instead of having the want to avoid harm, whether to themselves or others, they will find ways to reason and justify their actions. I’m not innocent of this, it’s not like I haven’t hurt myself, and it’s not like I still don’t hurt myself. It’s a work-in-progress, and I’d rather have it be something I’m actively working towards instead of something that I conclusively would decide to be unfixable, unchangeable, and it has to be, and no other way can be. Giving up your thoughts, your thinking, to commit to an action, can be pretty scary. It’s like giving up control, but that’s just your perception acting confused to the change, instead, it’s obtaining more control. Are you really in control if you’re not doing the thing you want to do? Are you really in control if you’re thinking about doing the thing, and not actually doing the thing? Even if you believe you are in control, do you prefer that control over doing the thing that needs to be done?
Even if you want to commit an action, you might have ideals of “intent.” Intent, whether because of my associations or it is part of the current zeitgeist, is an observable idea that I’ve been noticing for a while now, and I too, am caught up in it. This idea that, we should act in ways that are in alignment to our ideals, that we should not be caught up in the lives of others, but instead, refocus on ourselves, and obviously, do the things we believe are important, with focus. I don’t mind these ideals, and I still act in accordance to them, but I find that I am slowly teetering away from them. Intent comes from the mind, and the mind decides what should be done with or without intent, focus or without focus, and the mind can focus on inaction, the mind can focus on thought, the mind can focus on things that aren’t the doing. The mind follows actions, and if you want to use intent, it is usually described as a prerequisite to acting. Instead of this, I think that intent should follow action.
We want to rationalize why we do the things we do, how we do them, why we do them, and that’s okay, there is a time and place for that, but when you’re so totally caught up in those questions, that you don’t take a step back and notice you’re lost in the forest, you have to cease the questioning. Answers come of questions, but not all questions give satisfying answers, so we further question, hoping that, and under the assumption that, after enough questioning, we’ll be given the answers we want. This isn’t always the case, and we need to understand that side just as well as the one who wants answers. At times, you will feel things and want to act on them, and sometimes that’s okay. In other moments, you will feel things you don’t want to feel, and that’s okay, too. You don’t have to rationalize every feeling; you don’t have to understand or dissect each thought that thinks. Intent can act as excuse to avoiding what needs intent. If interested in intent, one should act, then be focused, and only then, can they understand if that is what needs intent or not.
If you do things, and you’re happy that you do things, and you will continue doing things, but disagree with what has been stated, then you’re a bit silly. No matter what words we use, no matter what aphorisms we surmise, nor what metaphors are conjured, all that is matters is what is. What is, that is, only comes from action, and if you act, then more power to you. Action doesn’t have to be categorically put into a box, action just is, and action will. On the opposing side, if you agree with what has been stated, then act, there need no more questioning. In the gray area, those who might disagree with the words but who want to act, then find other words, and those who agree but feel unable, focus on what stops you. Focus on what inhibits you, what blocks you from action.
Complications occur after the action has happened. We are wise enough to learn from previous actions, and wise enough to understand that not all actions are repeated exactly the same, if we believe it is so, then we have not looked dutifully enough into the action itself.
Well, no more hand-sitting. No more fear. No more questioning. No more inaction. Freedom brings fear, but fear is feeling, a feeling within the mind. No part of your body feels fear, your mind feels fear, and the mind wants a static world, but you want to be more, and if you want to be more, you have to be more than your mind. You have to be your mind and body, and you can, and you will. Feeling and knowing work together, not against each other, if you allow them.