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I thought a lot about thinking today while I mixed and formed my 22 adobe blocks.  The book my sister sent to me arrived yesterday, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and I’ve started reading it.  Tolle writes ‘pauses’ into his text to give the reader an idea how far and how much to read before pausing to consider his words.  I’m not far into it, being a big believer in pauses, but I can tell already that Tolle is saying that we are not our thoughts.

In fact, I think what he’s going to be saying is that our BIG self has nothing to do with mind or thinking at all.  I think he’s going to say that NOT THINKING frees us to be our BIG person who is somehow closer to ‘enlightened’.  I think he’s saying that when we can find the part of ourselves that can watch the thinking part of us doing all its busy thinking, we will be a step closer to understanding whatever it is he is writing about.

I won’t give up, though.  I’ll keep reading and pausing and reading and pausing – and I guess sooner or later I’ll be able to read without thinking and pause without thinking.  In the meantime I remember very well 18 years of childhood spent not thinking.  I evidently wasn’t close to ‘enlightened’, though, because I didn’t know I had a self to be thinking with.  Tolle seems to suggest that once a person can find this non-thinking person self and then BY CHOICE  STOP THINKING – well, that must be something entirely different.

Today I didn’t get very far in my pausing in regard to not thinking, even though I enjoyed the pauses – kind of like recess!.  I just thought about thinking just as I did when I woke up this morning.  Part of what is contributing to this thinking on thinking has to do with why I seriously doubt that, for all the information on this blog, that I can manage to write a book without outside help.

I was thinking about how I thought when I first had to write papers in art therapy graduate school in 1989.  I couldn’t think about what I was writing about straight on.  I took my notes, wrote my words, and then after my 3-year-old was in bed for the night, I cut every single sentence apart from the next one, laid all the little slips of paper on my living room floor, and proceeded to think about my thoughts.

I could move all the slips around, group them one way and then another way.  Eventually I figured out what thought went with what, and taped them together.  I didn’t have a computer, so off to the typewriter I went and worked through the night until I had a finished paper to turn into the professor the next day.

I never received anything but an “A” on a paper I wrote, and most of them my professor suggested I submit to art therapy journals for publication.  I never did.

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Then came the second year of graduate school, and the thinking got harder.  Near the end of my coursework, I was given an assignment to write a 40-page synthesis paper about the ideas contained in this book:  The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism – Hardcover (Feb. 20, 1981) by James Engell.  Believe me, this was NOT an easy or a fun project!  Take a look HERE at the Table of Contents.

But, boy oh boy, had I made progress in my ability to think and to synthesize ideas.  I read the book through and wrote a 50-page paper about the idea of the creative imagination as presented by 40 of the philosophers whose thoughts were presented in this book.

I received an “A+” plus on the paper, which was written straight through from beginning to end without notes.  I added the introduction as my final movement.  Yet never after that moment could I again remember one single bit of information from that book, nor could I remember one single thing I had written about it.  I had memory of being the person who had pursued the process of MAKING the paper appear, but that was all I ever had – except for my grade.  The chair of the department requested I submit that paper for publication.  I never did.

So, I have no idea how I can ever write a book.  I don’t want to become that dissociated Linda that could process information and write like that.  Neither can I be the ‘invested’ Linda that has to think that intensely about every single sentence I write.  Blogging just seems to fit because it can be as circular as a buzz-saw blade.

My writing can go somewhere or nowhere at all.  Nobody pays to read it.  If someone doesn’t like how I write or what I write – well, the internet’s the limit!  Unless some magical day appears in the future where I can write a ‘once and for all’, blogging is exactly where I will stay.

I posted my first thoughts here on April 10, 2009.  What matters to me is that I do not give up writing just because I cannot contain my ideas, thoughts, expressions or feelings within two covers of a book, although if this ever happens it will delight me.

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