December 12, 2024

Without a manager's say-so

I have been thinking a lot recently. I’ve been thinking about thinking, the easiest gift to give myself.

As a child, I loved to Think, an activity in its own right. Imagination, after all, is thinking on a scale we rarely touch again. Our brains haven’t made all the right connections. Reality and fiction bend together into a coherent and magical tapestry before our eyes. We spend the afternoon navigating worlds we create and control, ignorant (purposefully or practically) to the world around us. As a child, that’s thinking.

Thinking, at the time, was a land all its own. I’d make time to visit—escaping my sister and parents by climbing a tree or shutting a bedroom door. And then I would take the time to Think.

I stopped thinking for a while.

I didn’t stop processing information, learning things, or having ideas. But, after attending liberal arts college (Thinking: The Location), I figured my time for thinking was over. I had Things To Do. I had to be in motion, to move my life forward, to push. I had to keep pushing. What I was pushing or why are lost to me, but I know I was pushing.

I thought in the spare moments between Things To Do. I thought while commuting by bus or by train (a specific urban benefit). I thought while walking from bus stop to train station and vice versa. I did my thinking in those moments. Thinking was no longer an activity all its own. I had thoughts but they were background noise to my to-do list.

Having lived through previous acutely fascistic presidencies, I know there is a tendency in me, starting during George W. Bush and continuing through 2020, to stress. The weight of tomorrow seems endless. But there isn’t time for that now. As the right wing reaches toward the Big Brass Ring of fascism, I have to grip on to my own brass ring just as tightly. I have to embrace the world in which I want to live. But, to embrace it, I need to be able to see it. To see it, I need to be able to imagine it.

In 2020, my new therapist said to me, “Brainstorming is its own productivity.” The idea may not be particularly revelatory to you, but it opened to me a portal from my past and extending toward my future. Thinking as its own discrete activity. It deserved to be treated as such.

I got me Thinking again. “To Think” is a to-do list item as much as drinking a glass of water or making myself dinner. I Think in spare moments, of course. No one can separate me from my love of public transit. I Think while I walk the dog or do the dishes.

Now, however, I make sure to create space to Think. I cross-stitch, which is often a time for Thinking. I have acquired (but have yet to master) a Rubik’s cube which I spin in my hands as I spend time Thinking. When I am feeling particularly stressed, I will put on headphones and music and dance and Think.

I don’t believe in God. I wanted to, I really did. I tried for years to acquire some sort of religious fervor or, barring that, a half-hearted religious practice. But God doesn’t live on my block, so what was the point.

I believe in what I can see and what I know, and what I know are other people. I have a faith, but it is in those who surround me. My faith and my hope are bound up in the faith and hope of those I see, those I know, those I love, and those I have yet to meet.

Separating from Catholicism in my middle school years—first, for personal reasons and then for political ones—was nothing but a benefit. I was able to untangle myself from the pain of belonging to what amounts to, essentially, a book club led by pedophiles.

The only loss then becomes the structure, the authority, of making time to think. If we are bound by two twinned systems—those of religion and those of commerce—they work in tandem in denying you space for yourself. If you make time to pray, you are not asked to be productive. But, in Christianity, the organizing religious tradition of our current misfortune, you are asked, in essence, to doubt yourself as you make your entreaties to God. You are asked to sit down and make space you think can be for yourself, but in reality is for someone else. It isn’t a benefit to you or your community to hate yourself.

And, if you step away from religion, you suddenly lose the authority to ask for space away from the yawning maw of capitalism, the values of which chase us even into our dreams. (How many times have I dreamt about being late for work?) You cannot take time away from being productive. You are told you have things to do and—barring that—you have things to purchase, at the very least.

Where is the time for yourself? Where is the time to Think?

Thinking is both a singular and communal experience. I think alone, so I can bring those thoughts into my community. Thinking is a bulwark against the future. I won’t quote (or invoke) Descartes, but I’ll let you fill in the blank.

In taking time to Think, I imagine myself, I imagine all the versions of myself. I am able, then, to cobble together the one I wish to see. I am able to turn over a problem in my mind. There is no pressure to have an perfect answer or a clear solution. I am able to reaffirm or reject the values system by which I live my life. Like I was as a child, I take time to visit a land free of expectations outside of my own.

In the time ahead, I need to remember to Think, like those I admire. It is self-conscious, in a way, to think so highly of yourself—to grant yourself permission to step out of the constant screech for productivity and Think. It is the ultimate luxury: I have given myself the gift of time. No authority has allowed it, but I have taken it all for my own.