In Praise of Thinking

Thinking is much maligned! How often does one hear admonishons against thinking, or does someone trample with noises & cooings into your aerie of still bliss?

Thinking, it seems, is thought of (ha!) in any number of salubrious ways—as an attack by the left brain on the right, or by Word-mad Europeans on more tranquil, thoughtless First Peoples. There are those who suggest that any thinking is an imbalance, or a constriction of the spirit.

No, I say! All persons are thinkers, for there are so many different kinds. Thinking is more than some mechanical application of logical rules to statements of language—no, that is just cogitating.

What of considering, that easy gesture to hold in mind some events or people, turning them around, noticing and appreciating each facet in its fullness? To consider is to absorb things, to store what experience gives you.

Contemplating is what I have learned to call my attention to nature, such as it is. To "contemplate flowers" is to witness them and marvel at their making.

How about musing, which seeks after some faint inspiration caught on the wind, to toy with it and tease it out?

And musing, it sometimes gives way to full-blown imagining, a gale-force fury to flesh-out an image, to limn it with details and to make it scintillate in the mind.

This could hardly be confused with weighing, the judge's act of taking some incompatible observations and feeling out their heft, the better to inform further action. Weighing is what any of us does in the face of a mighty decision, when all ways cry "Yes" or all of them "No"; how could weighing be left to overwrought philosophers?

To say nothing of ruminating: deftly to duck into a forgotten corridor of memory, where scenes appear and have now a new impact, a new weight, in the light of ensuing experience. Who could count rumination as the logician's sole province?

Fathoming could cover the act of guaging a new-met stranger, sounding his depths, not to know him or prejudge, but just to know him, in the first days of the acquaintance.

If there is a universal among these species, I hope it is plotting. He who has never plotted an April Fool's gag or some delicious comeuppance is a lost man. To plot is to think, for sure.

Then there is reflecting, another maligned variety; but this too is essential, as it is every being's chance to see inside herself, to watch the feelings like a fire and discern the causes of their flickerings.

When courage is needed, I do a jot of summoning—summoning of powers, that is. By concentrating the mind, by reviewing the causes, the slights, the needs, that drive me to action, I can act with a firm resolve.

In this class I even count meditating, which clears out the mind and waits, and notices, and avoids taking hold. It is meditators, above all others, who condescend to my "thinking," but I count them my allies in this.

Thinking is not all (it is not meat, nor drink). But if you see someone silent, don't assume she's cogitating; she may be considering, or plotting, or summoning her powers.