Thinking is overrated

I have a terrible habit of carefully considering all the potential consequences of an action before taking it.  It kills spontaneity, and sometimes inspiration too.  I need a little more striking while the iron is hot, and a little less looking before I leap.

This habit is an unfortunate by-product of that misguided process called thinking.  We tend to laud its value in our rationally-driven society, but it is the antithesis of that other powerful sense, our intuition, the keening of our own inner certainty.

Don’t get me wrong, being clever can be an infinitely satisfying endeavour, thinking and thinking your way across vast tracts of intellectual landscape.  But here’s the rub: it doesn’t necessarily advance you at all in real terms.  Not beyond regular functioning, anyway.

Spirited! treatment of Close up of the The Thinker by Marttj

I am entitled to comment on this because I used to be smart.  Academically bright, as well as argue-you-into-a-corner clever.  My former intellectual prowess has now been blunted by a medicinal encounter with a mustard-gas derivative.  Nowadays, my thinking goes around and around without reaching any conclusion, rather like Nemo’s kind hearted friend, Dory, swimming in circles.  When thought comes before action, this is problematic, because the thought process is aborted before the action kicks in.  Nothing gets done.

Decision-making is no longer effortless.  When I do manage to string enough worthwhile thought together to warrant speaking about it, it falters in translation.  I find myself hovering midsentence around a word with a similar phonetic value to the thing I intended to say.  I stutter and umm until I either land belatedly on the intended concept, or abandon it and skip optimistically to the end of the sentence. (Who needs that word, anyway?).  I sometimes resort to charades, waiting for my audience guess my meaning while I say something obtuse like, “you know, that thing you put the water in…” (accompanied by watering-can gestures).  Yes I know how stupid that looks and sounds.  

And in case you’re reading this, congratulating yourself on your own continued mental agility, think again.  You too could find your mind enfeebled, given the right circumstances.  If you’re the one in 8 people who is going to have cancer, the chemotherapy will do it.  It’s a fact which medical science was quite happy to ignore until the breast cancer posse compared notes over coffee, then complained long and hard.  An accident that results in brain injury will do it.  Stress or trauma – and that includes major surgery – will do it as well (something about the hypothalamic-pituitary axis and cortisol levels.  Google it if you don’t believe me).  If you’re female, get ready for this kind of mental fogginess to besiege you during menopause.  There is a secret legion of highly intelligent, successful women out there who are covering up their cognitive shortfalls with exquisitely fine-tuned organisational systems.  Like sticky notes, lists and egg-timers.  Who do you think they invented the blackberry for, anyway?

Luckily for all of us, it turns out our brains are…(what was that word?) …plastic?  …elastic?  …fantastic?  In the bad old days, once a brain cell died it was gone for good.  Or so they thought.  Now the clever people have thunk up a new theory called neuroplasticity.  Basically it means that your brain can change in both structure and function as a result of your experiences.  There is hope for Dory, and for me, after all.

I can eat rainbow-coloured vegetables and fish (sorry, Dory).  I can flood my brain with oxygen through exercise and other deep breathing.  I can meditate in various ways to grow different types of neural connections (hopefully the serene, insightful, compassionate parts).  I can get all the sleep I need and learn to let go of stress.  I can stretch my function by learning a language, or dancing, or puzzles, or taking a class. 

This means I tend to rub shoulders with the olds at the public library a little more than your average 30-something, but they’re an interesting bunch, with histories and insights all of their own. There’s a certain power that comes from having been around longer than everyone else, which the arrogance of youth typically overlooks.  It turns out my brain may be in good company.  As Susan Maushart points out in her thought-provoking book, The winter of our disconnect, older people may be somewhat slower at acquiring new information, but their brains are much better connected across hemispheres, so their “…ability to process, organise and contextualise that information is unparalleled.”  So there may be hope for me yet.

Until then, thinking is still overrated.   

Unfurling

I’ll admit to being somewhat blogged-out at the end of my Ultimate Adventure, and needed to retreat a little and allow both my keyboard and my fevered imagination to cool somewhat.  However, now the New Year has begun, and with it a wave of experiences both exquisite and excruciating in their intensity.

Queensland flooded and I suffered a sympathetic inundation of my upper respiratory tract.  And so I camped in front of the rolling televised coverage, streaming my way blearily through a box or two of triple-ply tissues.  The boiling wall of destruction that swept through the Lockyer Valley is still unfathomable to me, despite my best efforts to comprehend it.  In stark comparison, the slow, well-planned water creeping and seeping into Brisbane under a flawlessly sunny sky was a contrast so enormous it seems nearly absurd.  Of course it is only the luxury of a safe distance that allows me to think this, not so for all the thousands of misplaced people, grieving the loss of loved ones or homes, or both. 

Despite all this I still live and breathe in a magical world, and I await the unfurling of the tendrils of this year with a sense of positive anticipation.



Cucumber tendril by whiteoakart