Thought Detours

Last summer my family and I took a vacation to Great Smoky Mountain National Park to celebrate the end of grad school, my PhD, etc. It was the perfect mid-pandemic getaway (minus the wasps haunting our rental house): remote, outdoors, and a timely reminder that nature’s power also comes charged with beauty. While my wife and I tried to squeeze in as many hikes as possible, our four kids found their happy place sitting in a stream piling rocks into little Ebenezers. Once they sat in a stream for a good two hours just happily puttering away with their stones, timetable be darned.

I thought about this yesterday as we took another mini-trip to the Omaha Zoo. The Henry Doorly Zoo is pretty incredible, one of those mega-zoos that would take more than a full day to fully explore (it even has an aquarium inside it). So we made a day of it, even when it meant me force-marching the kids through the doldrums of the afternoon, buying horrendously overpriced lemonade to keep up morale. In the midst of all this, I had reason to remember that Appalachian trip from last summer. In the section of the zoo dedicated to mountain animals from Asia, there’s a little garden with statues of some of the smaller critters you might see in those regions — pikas, pangolins, and others. The kids were quickly disappointed when they realized this was a habitat for statues only, and didn’t contain any live creatures. However, they quickly recovered and had a good time romping around. In the midst of this, our three year old started shouting excitedly, “Look, a roly-poly!” Despite the situation not being what they thought it was, and despite the fact that we have roly-polies by the cartload in our own yard, he was thrilled to find something worth stopping over.

Kids are like this, I’ve discovered after a decade of parenting. They zig when we zag, and find meaning in the small, easy to overlook areas of life. Mundane commonplaces like the lowly pill bug, or throwing pebbles into the water, are for them an occasion for wonder. Thinking about these opportunities for meaning makes me reflect on my own process of thinking. On Tuesday, I wrote a post about the difference between “thinking” and “problem solving,” and some of the barriers to real thought that we encounter. In that post I highlighted time as a necessary ingredient for real thought, and one of the primary reasons for this need has to do with my kids and their approach to the world, in a strange way.

Here’s a hard hitting stock photo to let you know I’m serious about thinking. Photo credit: Tilman Vogler.

As I wrote in my previous post, while “problem solving” involves a narrow focus on the issues right before us, “thinking” takes a more holistic, distanced approach. This means that thinking must be free to wander to places you might not expect. It requires an openness, a willingness to be surprised, to stop in wonder at what you never expected to find but have in fact stumbled over. It requires the ability to revise based on detours, to find that your original itinerary won’t do at all.

I don’t want to make the claim that I’ve done much real thinking in my life, but on occasion I have, at the least, sweated and strained against the constraints of my own limited abilities to at least grope my way toward a real thought (I take great solace in Browning’s vision of Andrea del Sarto, doomed to have a reach that exceeds his grasp, seeing the good but not achieving it). In those moments of highest attainment, there has always for me involved an act of letting go, of a loosening of the reigns on my preconceived ideas.

Here’s a small example. The core “pre” part of writing my dissertation involved simply figuring out which British authors had read some Kierkegaard and what they might have had to say about his work. A lot of my authors fit together fairly well for various reasons, but one was a little more troublesome to work into the paradigms I had erected: Aldous Huxley. Perhaps because he was such an unflinchingly individual writer and thinker, he just refused to be squished into the box I wanted to store him in. At that point I had a choice: abandon Huxley and keep my little worlds, cunningly made, or knock down some walls to make space for him. I’m very glad I chose the latter option; not merely because Huxley’s presence made my work in the dissertation much stronger, but also because reading through Huxley’s later novels and essays has made me a better thinker. His eccentricities have highlighted areas in my thought patterns that need refining, not merely reinforced my preexisting habits.

Whether or not the work I do in my diss (now officially my “book project” for purposes of the job market) achieves the status of real thought, it’s intellectual work I am proud of and can stand behind, in part because my risk taking let me see patterns that others have missed. It’s far from perfect, of course, but it contains something of value because it emerged naturally from the intersection of my own abilities with the material I tackled. And it was stronger than it might have been because I took the time to wander away from my original, tightly held notions, and to go explore detours. Of course, at some point I had to come back from those detours, and indeed, my chapter on Huxley (and Graham Greene) required by far the most revision and reworking of any of my chapters. But that’s a story for another time.