The Beauty of Intentional Thought

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

What’s the first thing you do in the morning?

Grab you phone and scroll through social media?

Read the news, maybe?

Are your thoughts throughout the day mostly fleeting? How often do you think deeply about something?

Before the advent of modern technology, we all had to rely on the wetware between our ears to remember things and process ideas. (Of course, this is still the ideal process.)

Before technology, new information came at us a lot slower. Even for voracious readers, the primary means of consumption were printed materials: newspapers, magazines, other periodicals, etc. The newspaper arrived once a day; some magazines once a week. For books, you had to go somewhere to buy them, check them out, or order them via the mail.

All of the in-between waiting gave our brains time to assimilate new information and form new ideas. The process went something like this:

1. Consume information
2. Consider it against prior experiences and thoughts
3. Formulate new thoughts and ideas, alone or as part of discussion with others
4. Assimilate or dismiss
5. If assimilated, act on new thoughts / knowledge
6. Rinse and repeat