Reflections
Having thoughts ≠ thinking
The other day I was thinking about something. My mind was all over the place, and I was having trouble staying focused or making any real progress in my thoughts.
Then I realized: I’m not “thinking” about this. I’m just “having thoughts”.
Too often we mistake one for the other.
The act of thinking is a purposeful thing. It involves direction and implies having an explicit intention and focus. You can direct your thinking, guide it, refine it.
In contrast, “having thoughts” is simply the act of noticing thoughts running through your brain. It is completely different than thinking. It's like your brain on auto pilot without a destination, or on loud speaker without a defined subject. It's not a bad thing – I just think it's important to distinguish between the two, because they are very different.
I think confusing them even has the potential of being dangerous:
Consider a situation where you have a negative opinion of someone. You think they're out to make you look bad. By default, your unconscious mind wants to find evidence to support your belief. So, if you see the person do something that seems suspect, your most likely automatic conclusion is that this action is just one more piece of evidence confirming your view. That is more like "having thoughts" about the situation. If you were to purposefully THINK about it, you could catch yourself making the same old worst-case assumption and then say to yourself, "OK, she didn't necessarily intend to have that impact. I'm just making up the same old bad story again. Why else might she have done that? Maybe, in fact, she was actually trying to be nice and extend an olive branch."
The example above is really mild, but consider stereotypes, racism, and other forms of discrimination, fear, or hate. Often these problems are fuelled by the absence of REAL THINKING; by our unwillingness to challenge our own ideas – to ask ourselves why we believe what we believe about a certain person, group, or subject.
So, the next time someone asks you to “think about it”, check in with yourself to see whether you're really thinking about it or you're just "having thoughts" about it.
