Thinking Things Through

The ability to think things through beams me on, but the process is sometimes almost unbearable.

When I'm thinking through a problem or a situation or a hypothetical or a thematic or...whatever... there are so many thoughts buzzing around me that I want to bat them all off. I want to put everything into binaries and force them into categories.

But I know better. My whole life has been an attempt to discover, and enact, the discipline of thinking the unthought, asking the unasked, complicating the easy judgment. To do this requires that I put everything I am on the line. I can't protect my favorite prejudices from mutation. I can't protect my heart. Sometimes that's freeing, and it's almost always pretty frightening. Sometimes there are touchstones to hold onto - and sometimes there aren't.

Each time it happens, I'm thrown into chaos. I never get used to it. I find one little bit here, and it connects there, and then there are clusters, and resonances. And eventually, you can build up a sense, through intuition and logic and empathy (and other things) as a vision gradually shimmers into being. The vision and feeling come first. Sometimes the words help in the construction, but sometimes words act as the via negativa - the thing that must be crossed out and erased - and then somehow reconstructed and rewritten, over and over. And sometimes there are no words at all.

I keep doing this, although it is fraught with difficulties of all kinds. I'm only courageous in this one way, that even when I'm frightened and hurting I keep seeking a closer, a warmer relationship with truth - and with the kinds of illusions that point to another kind of truth, too.

Ultimately, it only matters to me that this is the path I'm on. Sometimes it's a very lonely path. I change a little bit with every new insight and it sometimes feels like people prefer other people to stay the same. The essence of me - and I do sense that there is one, and that it is unique and eternal - is not that easy to reach or to recognize, or even maybe to like very much. But in this one way, I'm serving - as me, as the only me there is - and this has been my calling. I do stand for that, that path of thinking with everything I have.

"Thinking" is a placeholder concept here in a way. By "thinking" I include sensing, intuiting, smelling, seeing, imagining, touching, listening, tasting, rehearsing, loving, longing for, being repulsed by, paying attention to, ruminating upon, and playing with. Everything I am or could be goes into it - body and soul and spirit and mind - to think things through. Whatever that really means.

Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes I would change what I've learned for something else that I would highly prefer. I'm tired of being threatening to people for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes I feel that no-one will ever understand who I am and what I'm about.

Even so, it's worth it. It's worth everything.