Fist Bumping

"Thinking" as (llike) Fist Bumping

Dear Jeff (not exclusively to Jeff: colleagues
across the curriculum, too),

I'm not thinking about governance or sustainability
or American Literature or Health-Care (wellness
& fist bumps) at the moment, I'm trying to think
about thinking and Einstein's notion that the kind
and level of thinking that gets us into a problem
can't be the kind that gets us out.

I could USE governance or sustainability or
American Lit or wellness as token topics to
think about thinking, seeing as it seems I have
to be thinking about something so as to watch
the “thinking going on”; but that would be
strange and difficult for me because all those
topics tend to dominate (their profound &
practical importance) the thinking so that it's
almost impossible merely to use/abuse them
as transparent place-markers, say, and
subordinate to the whole process being
considered: the media as well as the
messages..

(Have you ever tried to suggest to your
significant other that the argument is NOT
about taking-out-the-trash or doing-the-
dishes-last, but about the RELATIONSHIP?
Difficult to bring off: this figure/background
shift. The topic (content) always seems to
eclipse the process. "Yes THIS IS ABOUT
THE TRASH, SAM."

That right there might be what E. meant by
the capacity to think on a different KIND and
LEVEL to exit a problem, if not resolve. I don't
know. If a different kind and level of thinking
were present to me—would I even recognize
it as “thinking”? If it were really different?

I'm thinking I'm thinking right now but I guess
what I'm calling “thinking” (& know as “thinking”)-
is probably just the part I'm familiar with (&
conscious of) when I think I'm thinking, and
thinking about thinking: & not even close to
the whole of it —know what I'm saying?

I can probably think about how I think about
writing, say, or doing chemistry if I did it--
or even biology, or playing tennis or piano,
solving a problem in composition or in
strategic planning. But my version of what's
actually happening when I do these things
is not only a reduction & mere representation
but liable to eclipse if not occlude what's
actually going on: what’s hap-ening..

Sort of like beetling across the grasslands
rolling a ball of elephant dung full of high
sentence and lofty purpose—but actually
moving in a cloud of unknowing unknowing
I'm in a cloud of unknowing.

Yet the arches emerge, never the less.

Like, I'm saying.
"Something-Like" thinking going on here.


fist bumping