THE other day I met a 70-year-old woman who lifts weights and who not long ago dropped a 25-pound weight on her foot. She was wearing expensive, made-for-weight-lifting shoes so her foot was only bruised, not crushed, and she was only incapacitated for a few months.

But good grief, I thought: I will never take up weight lifting. I can’t afford the shoes, for one.

Weight-lifting seems hard — really, really hard — but then it’s not half as hard as the hardest thing one can do. Thinking is much harder.

I’m not holding myself up as an exemplar of thinking, but I try to practice this dying art and extreme sport. The fact that you can do it in any shoes is an advantage for me personally, but other than that it has immense disadvantages and risks.

Let me list a few:

Thinking takes time, and time is money.

Thinking hurts your head. It’s a dull ache.

Thinking, done often enough, cannot help but remind you of your own stupidity. (See more below.)

Thinking requires quiet, and we live in a noisy world.

Thinking can’t be done in Think Tanks.

Thinking goes against atavistic tendencies. Most of us have an irrepressible, primordial longing to be a one-celled creature without a brain — the one and only argument in favor of Darwinism.

Thinking may wreck your social standing. Better to be a prostitute or a drug dealer. You will be more highly regarded.

Thinking is illegal in some countries.

Thinking and poverty were made for each other.

Thinking, when done correctly, may appear to be stupidity.

Thinking leads its practitioners to jump to false conclusions, wander down blind alleys, get stuck with spinning wheels, experience flights of fancy and false states of euphoria, become raging maniacs now and then and sometimes be tempted to despair.

Thinking requires humility. If thinking doesn’t often lead you to feel worse about yourself then it is merely a dangerous exercise in self deceit. To discover that you thought something wrong or untrue — to discover even that you caused harm by thinking the wrong thing or willfully reached the wrong conclusions — is much, much worse than dropping a 25-pound weight on your foot. The burning regret may last for years or for the rest of your life. The mind is connected to the will and heart. Often, we don’t want the truth. Our intellectual crimes are so much worse than all other wrongs we commit, without exception, because our mental mistakes are the authors of all our missteps.

There is only one bright spot here: We are not alone.

We should never rely on our own resources in this most difficult pastime. Angels, especially our supernatural guardians, are willing to be called in for assistance, and they are brighter than we are.

More importantly, the Divine Thinker who created thought itself wants to aid us. Never, ever think for yourself. You will still err, but He will pick you up, dust you off and get you started again. Without mercy, without this forgiveness and love, how could we continue? Thinking must be a form of surrender, or it is not worth doing at all.

Please follow and like us: