Thinking Takes Time

Smart refrigerators, feral horses, autocompleted destinies, heist-movie gunfights and millions versus billions of years.

Thinking takes time. This seems obvious. But it’s like a buoy in a hard tide. To stay where it is requires a lot of resistance.

A thought may be immaterial and even transcendent, but thinking is a physical act, an electro-chemical process. Even when it happens very fast, thinking doesn’t happen all at once.

The other day I was reading a book by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and he made this point. I was feeling exhausted when I read it, and it struck me. It was something very basic that I’d forgotten.

New confusions

Thinking itself seems to have changed in my lifetime. The way thinking used to work is that something would happen and then a person would think about it. Those thoughts would form a foreground, which would then refocus and reformulate the background idea of one’s world.

Simple enough, but the order has been disrupted by the pushy, prosthetic brain in our pockets. It claims to have done all the knowing and thinking already. All the thoughts in this device are linked according to a system decided on before we showed up. The links follow fast upon one another in a distributed network. In this way, reading the internet is sex without orgasm - how do you know when you’re done?

While the internet offers a lot, one’s personal motive and inquisitive urgency get lost. The cart of information outpaces the horse of thinking. The horse goes feral or takes a nap.

Saxophones and St. Paul

Thinking takes time. This should be obvious. But in the moment, nothing is obvious. Only afterwards can we make the connection. And lasting connections take time to intuit, identify and test.

There was a century between the invention of the saxophone and Charlie Parker doing what he did with it, three decades between the first electric guitar and Jimi Hendrix. Try to imagine the long, empty hours Charles Darwin had during his five years on the HMS Beagle with nothing to do but think.

St. Paul was knocked off his horse, blinded, given with a vision of all times by the Son of G-d and given a new first name. He still needed three years