Real thinking

I bet it has been a while since you last sat under the stars and thought in total silence for 30 minutes. Or driven around without the radio or a podcast or an audiobook on.

I don’t know about you, but I was a very introspective kid. I’d think about life and death, what I’d do when I grew up, who I’d marry, all the big things… when I was in middle school.

Somewhere along the way, that started to leave me. These days I’m caught up in work, raising kids, being a husband, and trying desperately to not lose my own self in a world of nonstop motion.

It’s time for us to start to think slow and hard again. We’ve been thinking fast, shallow, and fragmented thoughts for a while now.

I did this just last night. I sat out in the cold, under the stars. I looked up at one particular star for about 10 straight minutes and thought about how that star is a burning ball of gas somewhere in the neighborhood of one trillion miles away. I thought about how the light I see from that star has been traveling through space a long time to reach my eyes. I thought about how amazing it is that I’m capable of simultaneously thinking about how incredible our universe is without really being able to fully appreciate how incredible our universe is.

Sometime in the next couple of days, bundle up and go look at the stars. Or drive around in silence. Or lay on the floor at stare up at the ceiling and think about your life, existence, everything that you haven’t really stopped to consider in quite some time. It is hard work when you haven’t done it in a while. But real thinking is one of the most important things we can do.