A Thought-Experiment

I performed a little thought experiment this evening while cooking and thought I'd share it. The experiment began with a question:

What are some things that sound easy at first, but are actually quite difficult in practice?

It's a funny question you know, in large part because of the way it can surprise and astonish. This quality, I believe, is a good thing.

At any rate, two things in particular came to mind upon asking this question of myself. The first involved sitting quietly in a room and doing nothing at all for about an hour. You might think doing nothing is easy enough, but for many people (myself included) doing nothing is actually quite difficult. Try it if you like, just to see how you react. Consider the thoughts that enter your mind, or the impulses that emerge from the inner-chatter of your thought. How do you feel when you do nothing? Does it require much effort to stay put and keep from applying your energy to something other than sitting? The exercise is an interesting one, and as I said, it can prove far more difficult in practice than it sounds at first.

The second thing that came to mind involved letting go of thoughts about the past and the future. Take a moment if you like, just to observe the kinds of thoughts that regularly come to mind. What are they like? Are you thinking about something that happened in the past? Or are you considering something involving the future, such as "what should I do now?"

In both cases, it can prove difficult to stop thinking of either. This is not necessarily a bad thing (see Jonah Lehrer's February 2010 piece from The New York Times), as this tendency seems to allow people to think deeply about a subject. But it can also cultivate debilitating mental states like depression. As Mr. Lehrer points out, there is surprisingly little difference between a brain that is concentrating and a brain that's depressed: both involve fixating on a particular idea, over-and-over again. That thought may be a good one (think Darwin and his preoccupation with evolution), but it may also be one that leaves you very upset.

Having considered this idea, I wondered how one might more easily let go of the harmful sort of thought. At first nothing came to mind, but then I examined the spatula in my hand and imagined it was a thought I wanted to let go. I even imagined little letters appearing on the handle reading "bad thought." With that, I put the spatula on the pan, walked to other side of the kitchen, turned around, and gave the stove a look. Strangely enough I felt lighter than before, even though I didn't actually feel a need to let go of any thoughts just then. "What on earth happened?" I wondered to myself. Had I actually ditched some mental baggage unintentionally? It was very strange.

Yet perhaps it was also illustrative. Indeed, both tasks I'd considered--doing nothing, and thinking about neither the past or the future--seem be made easier by learning how to let go of mental baggage. In our experiment, the mental action occurred with the intervention of a physical proxy (the spatula). Without the physical object, the task was very difficult; with it, the task became much easier.

I'm not certain what this means precisely, except that letting go of certain mental preoccupations (which are very normal) seems to make certain types of concentration-heavy tasks easier. Perhaps it is akin to lightening one's back-pack before climbing a mountain; the more you bring with you, the harder the climb. That's one possibility.

In any case, I encourage you to try the thought-experiment yourself. You may be surprised what you find.

Happy Friday, friends :)

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