Thinking Deep Thoughts

Life seems to be awfully busy: it's challenging to find the time to think deep thoughts. Our ADD culture makes it tempting to just adopt the easy, breezy quips that come our way, to read the abstract or the summary and pass over the deeper exploration. It's like skimming the Coles notes but never actually reading the literary masterpiece. We live and breathe and have our being in a Twitter and texting mindscape, rarely, if ever, making a silent space around us to foster deep thinking.

For me, thinking deep thoughts is like being in several worlds at once: submerged and floating through a fluid environment... or digging, exploring quietly in the dark, like archeologists or miners, unearthing treasures.

Are higher thoughts different than deep thoughts? They seem to be painted with a moral overtone, but I'm not convinced that they are fundamentally different. We build our churches with spires reaching to the sky, we look up beyond the clouds for inspiration and we sometimes describe the highest level of academics and abstract thinkers as living in an ivory tower, way above the rest of us. We picture our imaginations taking flight, giving us the ability to float above our earthly pressures and beyond our daily atmosphere of cloudy tunnel vision, obscured by the information smog that surrounds and engulfs us when we allow it.

But whether we describe them as deep thoughts or high thoughts, they need fertile space to thrive...so they can nourish us, replenish us, and inspire us to free our minds of clutter, filling them with treasure instead.

If only we could find the time...