197. To Live Without Thinking

To live without thinking feels dangerous. We’ve been taught to always think about what we’re doing in order to avoid harmful mistakes. We’ve been taught to carefully monitor ourselves to ensure we follow the norms of our society. We’ve been taught to review and evaluate our performance to know where we stand and how we should improve.

Reflection on our past and future actions is important for these and other reasons, but we also know there is such a thing as too much thinking. We can easily overthink a problem and become trapped in rumination, which prevents us from making a decision and taking necessary action.

We often need to disengage from rational processes of categorization, evaluation, and comparison in order to clear the blockage that is preventing us from changing our situation. By putting aside the conceptual world of reason, we are then able to better focus on the active world of experience. This means allowing ourselves to function freely and without being hindered by excessive self-monitoring and judgment.

We might think we will necessarily become more careless if we inhibit rational thought, but this would be a mistake. If we are aware of and sensitive to the people and things around us, then we will always respond to the world with care and compassion. We will do this directly, without having to think or analyze. We will feel deeply the necessity of engaging with others in a way that is empathetic and considerate of their needs.

This does not mean that our actions will be perfectly compassionate in practice. Mistakes will still happen, and we’ll need to reflect on them in order to continue expanding our awareness of ourselves and others. But rather than seeing the absence of thought as certain danger, we can take it as an opportunity for freedom from self-judgment and the anxiety it often produces.