Thinking too much... [starting points]

I am sitting here pondering a few things.

Many of us think best when we are in contact with others who interact and we hone our thoughts & decisions based on the feedback we get. Others have a God-given ability to think in isolation. Not me - well not much of the time as I like being around stimulating and bright people too much.

Others of us just decide on a course of action and then go full steam ahead until they get through the gap or die against the wall they just hit, resurrect and then repeat a variant of the pattern again.

Some of us are forever going to be what I call “pattern adopters” - this worked well in the past so it should work again.

Others, like me, I call “first principles thinkers” and we are the types that resolve everything down to the component parts and then can use these as building blocks to craft a new solution for the particular problem we find. In my view this approach is more likely to be able to cope with the ambiguity that we encounter every day. Nothing remains the same yet there is nothing new under the sun too.

Thinking and survival are interlinked - only because thinking is a prelude to action. Thinking with no action cannot lead to survival unless of course the best option was to do nothing at all.

Common sense - is not that common, except in hind-sight. How to get common sense into your life early enough to make a difference is something I ponder. I always thought I had plenty of common sense, but not when it came to trusting people - I always wanted to believe the best of everyone until proven wrong. But now I see this was not common sense at all because not all can be trusted and to think that they can be trusted until they prove otherwise makes us too vulnerable.

But there has to be a middle ground as you can’t be too stand-offish or you will miss out on valuable friends and great times and possibly life-changing insight.

Keeping your wits about you, testing, probing, thinking, not blindly “going where no man has gone before” like some biological feedback loop has to be the answer. But to lose the open & trusting nature which we all take as “friendliness” would be a tragedy too. Not everyone is out to get you - we don’t need paranoia to rule & ruin the day too.

However, having said all that, in my experience there are the strong, the weak and the unaware (not original, I will admit) and the strong often have no boundaries and will keep on taking what is not theirs until they run into a greater force than themselves.

So while we all may aspire to be strong, the strong of this world are not necessarily the role model for us to follow. The humble focused contributor to the local society, the team or the corporate may actually be the strongest and they have the focus and contribution that many of the so-called strong lack.

Hmmm… not sure where this is going but it will come out I suspect…

Self-determination is one of the elements of freedom and something we all cherish in a democratic society but self-determination at the expense of others is tyranny surely? So we may associate strength and self determination but self determination moderated by respect for others is real strength.

Hence the reason the so-called follower, not the “leader” may be the stronger of the two, and the better role model.

What do we see today with our sports stars - many are strong but immature, have no moral frameworks, are always in the paper for lewd and unseemly behavior - the strong know no bounds. But clearly they are not the role models or the “aspirational elements” we want to promote - but we do in every media clip, commentary, news broadcast and billboard.

The real heroes must be those who make up the rest of the team and pass the ball at the right time for the last minute dash? Yeah sure there are the stand out ones that have it all - and they are great and should be promoted, but sadly they are few & far between.

So I am thinking that we should “hold all things, test all things”, and then only retain that which is beneficial to the wider good.

And so I am starting to see why real strength and leadership is thoughtful, humble and empathetic.

How then does the average person move to a place of strength and stop being “road kill” for the stronger ones. I think the answer may be in our face - by the silent ones working together and being the stronger team, not letting the school-yard bullies (now grown up) have their way.

I am going to have to revisit this as there are lots of starting points & I would love to have some input and comments if you agree or disagree.