The fig tree that taunts the protagonist in Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, is a widely recognized, read and analyzed passage. It’s iconic, really (ignoring the fact it’s always taken completely out of the context of the story). 

However, let’s imagine us coming back to that fig tree at a point in our lives when we’ve made our choices. 

Look at all the figs that have fallen to the ground.

Lives that could have been. 

Pasts that can no longer be reclaimed. 

We can look at all of them with regret, making futile attempts to pick them up and have a bite as they rot away. Or we can mourn them. 

Start the grieving process in order to move on.

Because we’re here and there are other trees to eat from in the garden of our lives.

Your attention.

Your undivided, focused, attention.

There’s nothing else that could give them that same feeling.

Learning to love is a difficult task as it requires a certain emotional maturity. This isn’t something that’s necessarily defined by age, but man, it’s something I wish I had more of when I was younger. 

The idea of love was a bit of a foreign concept, especially in the way that others spoke about it.

Sure, if you pressed me enough, I would tell you that I loved my family, but I didn’t know what that really meant. Love wasn’t even my most treasured emotion—it was anger. I was an angry person for many years, holding onto it without ever knowing why. 

It wasn’t until I learned to let go of that anger, that I was fully able to experience love.

Replacing hositility and bitterness with an outlook of love has changed me in numerous ways and I continue to work at it. I don’t always get it right, and it’s not easy, but it certainly helps my relationships with others . 

Loving others, and doing it well, requires more than words: it requires you to live a message.

It’s a never-ending process, but worth working on.

The hardest part of any project isn’t doing the work, or even getting started, it’s doing the thinking for it. That’s where most people stall out because they either don’t want to think (and the brain hates using up its resources unnecessarily) or they overthink and aren’t sure where to begin.

I’ll even be so bold as to say the biggest challenge of being human is to engage in critical thinking.

This is why the idea of outsourcing our brains is such a powerful one. Why bother keeping anything in there, or thinking through anything, when we can get something external to think for us? In fact, it might even do a much better job.

Isn’t this the promise of the technological utopia espoused to us by technologists? Once we achieve the singularity (a merging of human and machine), we will have elevated the human being to a new evolution of existence. 

Our existence will be solved.

We will all be better off.

Of course, this necessitates that somebody before us has done the proper thinking… and one that will set us on a good course… 

But how is that working out for us right now?

Much of our thinking is influenced by algorithms that feed us what we want to hear, mainly guided by marketing for companies to profit. Even our education system is designed in a way that follows the current thinking of the time without any regard for conversation or argument.

And with a cacophony of information being dumped upon us, it’s impossible to spend time filtering out what matters and what we should reflect upon. Our world is moving so fast it doesn’t want us to stop and think.

Just take it for what it is and move on.

Put the question in the AI Chatbot, get an answer and feel satisfied with what it gave.

Accept this particular news source as the reliable one because the others seem nonsensical.

Quick answers. Shortcuts. Done.

Anything to avoid putting the actual effort into thinking, which works out great for the people who want to manipulate that laziness. Which is what this is: manufactured laziness.

Just as a body falls into a state of disrepair when it’s not taken care of, as does the mind. Exercise the thinking muscle with the utmost strain and we may find ourselves in a society that thinks for itself once more.

If A leads to B

and B leads to C,

where C is a regretful action,

then it’s probably best to stop doing A, rather than finding ways of recovering from C.

Prevention is always more potent than cure and it’s best to cut off the head of the snake before it devours us.

about everything?

It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.

Best to be open to the possibility.

We are an information society, but have fallen into the trap of absorbing answers without ever asking a question. An answer without a question has no life and does not penetrate the deepest recesses of our curiosity.

It dies the moment it hits us and we are no more knowledgable, or better off, than when we started.

We fall into the delusion of knowledge because the information is there and crossed our periphery at one point, but it has never taken root. We are stripped of our ability to think because we have been prevented from the act of learning.

Stay curious. Ask questions.

Be a seed of immeasurable growth instead of a rock buried in rich soil.

I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned from getting to know someone really well is how little I know anyone.

Robert Pantano (Pursuit of Wonder)

And yet, it’s so easy to judge.

It’s taken me a while to gather my thoughts on this subject as it’s a microcosm of a much larger idea I want to elaborate on. 

But there’s a point I want to hammer down.

It was something I couldn’t put my finger on when the Internet went crazy over note taking systems and specifically, Zettelkasten. For those reading that word for the first time, it’s German for slip box. It has been appropriated today to mean a technique by German academic Niklas Luhmann, who credited his low-tech interlinked note system (using a slip box) for his prolific output. 

The discovery of this process has spawned numerous programs to replicate its process. Now, while I can appreciate these programs (especially Obsidian) as a wonderful digital note-taking tool, there’s still a bigger problem.

Luhmann remarked that his slip box was his thinking partner. 

Key word: thinking.

He is a product of his time when thinking was valued more than cramming as many cited sources into a paper as possible. In other words, during his time, it was okay for people to have thoughts. I fear that academics have rushed to his process without consideration for the jump that’s happened and might want to take a step back.

Yes, he was prolific, but he wasn’t just taking notes, filing them and calling it a night.

He was thinking about his work, engaging with it and writing about it constantly. When you have an obsession, you have no choice but to feed it. When you don’t, you’re just wearing the costume pretending to be the character.

The solution to gaining clarity in our thinking is to not adopt a system that worked for a particular academic, but rather to engage in the process of thinking and showing it to others.

There’s no shortcut around it.

It’s peculiar that I should happen to read this article by Kris Rusch as I reflect on my hesitation recently to post content here. While I’ve never had issues in the past with hitting that ‘Publish’ button after writing some thoughts, there’s been a new hesitation.

Maybe it’s just my ego trying to protect itself, but my self-doubt has been ramping up:

Do people care? 
Is this really relevant?
Should I just relegate my thoughts to paper and be uninhibited by such thinking?

At the heart of these thoughts is fear. 

And fear is a lifelong process that we all need to work through.