thinking about thinking tagged posts

Like most writers, I keep a cache of mostly random thoughts, snippets, excerpts, ideas for future projects that I store in a folder on my digital desktop. It’s a big file that I add to whenever I can catch myself in the act of thinking, and in doing so, step outside of that thinking just far and long enough to say, “Hmmm…there may be a blog (or sermon or poem) in that.”

This process, of interrupting one’s unself-conscious immersion in a thoughtstream to consciously note that one is having a thoughtstream that may be worthy of further thinking, is a rather interesting occurrence itself. It is thought reflecting upon thought, which, by virtue of its interruptive qualities, inevitably changes the original thoughtstream that prompted the whole enterprise.

So very meta.

(“I just saw this movie about these people making a movie, and the movie they were making was about the movie industry…” goes on...

What could I have been thinking? It’s a question we ask ourselves with regularity when we have acted like dunderheads, making some half-baked decision on a purchase or a course of action, a relationship, a career move or a business deal. It can apply when we have done something we shouldn’t have or not done something we should have, and it can always apply—probably more easily, given how we’d rather point the finger outward than at ourselves—to others.

What were they thinking? (Bush and Cheney invading Iraq, Clinton with Monica, every person who consents to being grilled on 60 Minutes, all karaoke singers everywhere…)

It’s a beautiful question, so aptly and succinctly does it frame, with a dose of sardonic humor, the human tendency to act really, really stupidly on occasion. And no one is immune.

Shrewd and worldly, lowly and dim, middle class midwest or upper class upper east side: you’d need ...