On Making a Website and Taking Yourself Seriously

I spend a lot of time creating, and you have to think to create, so I spend a lot of time thinking. I also spend a lot of time thinking about thinking, an activity I picked up partially from my unique blend of mental illnesses, partially from my formal education in, uh, education.

Today, I’m listening to a podcast some of my former students run, and I’m just so taken and proud of how they’re carving out their thought processes. It’s impressive to see people so young with so much intuition and introspection. God knows I didn’t have any wits when I was a teenager.

But as I’m trying to figure out traits of how they think, I start to think about specific qualities of the way I think. Can I get to some of these qualities, put a name behind them? I probably can.

That’s when a single word pops into my head: rigid. But that’s not what I want to be. In fact, that one word is so antithetical to what I want to be that I can almost define my thought process as in opposition to rigidity.

All this to say that I’ve always found writing a really good tool to cement my thoughts. It’s like I’m hammering out positions with each letter. And I want my position on how I think to be deeper than just “in opposition to rigid”.

The reason I’m in opposition to “rigid” in the first place is because it implies the lack of the ability to bend. I think a thought process that functions healthily should bend without breaking. There should be openness enough to allow for the acquisition of knew knowledge, but structure enough so as to never fully break.

Dynamic.

That’s the best I can think of right now, but that sounds fairly cliche, I think.

I think a good thought process, a good way to think, is a robust, non-reductive system. I think openness, quickness, and the ability to try out new thoughts are important. Again, the ability for your thought process to bend but not break is essential. In my view at least. It’s kind of like that Carl Sagan quote about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out.

I guess if I’m going to put a pin in all of this, I want to be someone who is open, but systemic about it. Is that good enough? For now. For a quick lil rant on a website no one will read.