Our thoughts are a jumbled mess. Things tend to repeat with subtle variations and they tend to jump around at random points in an inconsistent manner. Keeping our mind on a single thing is hard and our thoughts are not as logically consistent as we might think, despite the fact that our thinking and though processes feel perfectly rational and deliberate to us. We don’t think in a steady, rational, and linear way, even though we usually think that we do. Our thoughts are often incomplete, pick up right to the middle of an idea rather than at the start, and sometimes are just nebulous and hazy.
It is funny how often you can pick up on people having trouble with their thoughts, revealing this inner jungle gym, if you look for it. Podcasts and every day conversations are great places to hear people start to organize the thoughts flying through their head. They are not reading from a perfect mental bullet point list, they don’t have an essay prepared in their mind, and their thoughts don’t flow logically in order from point A to point B and down the line. Podcasters will often say things like, “I’m still trying to work this out in my head, so this might not come out right.” In conversation, you may have had the experience where you are talking to someone about something, and they bring up a starting point factor that you had never considered. Often, for me at least, it is a huge factor that I knew about, but just hadn’t quite connected to my larger point and seriously thought about.
The reality for people is that our thoughts cannot be orderly and cannot be made sense of if we don’t do something to think our thoughts out. Speaking and writing are great ways to think something out. You have to take your ideas, put actual words to them, and then think about how the words will convey the idea in your head so that the ideas will make sense in the mind of another. You have to start thinking about order and logic, and how you will present what you think and feel for someone else. It is a complicated effort, and if you break down this seemingly natural process, you see how difficult each step can be.
Different forms of thinking it out have different advantages. In writing, the great part is that you can do practice messaging in writing, editing and deleting what doesn’t quite fit or doesn’t best communicate your thoughts. Speaking is faster than writing, which is helpful, but leads to more mistakes and isn’t as friendly for trial and error. Nevertheless, it helps us take what is in our head as incomplete and often disconnected thoughts and ideas, and begin to align them in a more stable and rational manner. Sometimes we don’t really know exactly what we think until we go through this process, either speaking or writing out our thoughts to get them out of our head, but also to make sense of them in our head for no audience other than ourselves. As Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius in Letters From a Stoic, “I am admitting you to my inmost thoughts, and am having it out with myself, merely making use of you as my pretext.”
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