I hate thinking

Okay, so maybe that's putting it a bit strongly. But as year after year has crept by, as page after page from my calendar has fallen away, I've begun to realize how useless too much thinking can be. And ooty my love, if you're reading this, you know that both you and I ponder stuff way too much.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, who lives in Harvard square. He's been in Boston for the past many years now. He's in his late thirties but still a bachelor...no roommates either. I asked him why he lived in such isolation, although I already knew the answer. He said, "you get the chance to think about life and religion." I knew that's what he would say, because I'm going through the same thing.

Last November, Ooty and Murzi, one old and one new buddy, came to visit. Before that, I was living in intense isolation, meeting friends only on weekends, and spending most of the week rarely talking to anybody. I'd begun to love that loneliness, because it was giving me an insight into things I never could have attained around people. I won't go into details, because they're irrelevant and not terribly exciting, but to sum it up, things were beginning to tie together. I would see something and hear this 'click' in my mind and be able to relate it to something else philosophically. Sounds confusing, I know, but you have to go through it to understand it. With each passing day, I sank further and further into myself.

But here's the thing though. When ooty and Murzi came, and right after that, when I went to Pakistan, none of these things had any practical application. None whatsoever. Yes, they were beautiful on paper, but when I was plunged from isolation into a swarm of people, that "reasoning" part of my brain just switched off, and instinct took over. It's rather like being thrown head first into a swimming pool when you don't know how to swim. All thoughts are suspended. I'm guessing that's why thinkers isolate themselves from people in the first place.

To get to a point, I think that thought, or excess of it, tends to cripple you . It gives you insight into the truth, into the bigger picture, and that starts dragging you down like a rock chained to your legs. It makes you sober and older...kills the child within you. In the survival of the fittest, in the materialistic race that 90% of people are in, you will have no place whatsoever if you think too much. You need instinct to be able to survive in the animal world, and if you ponder into the wee hours of the night, you start marring that instinct. You start dulling drives that you need for "success" like ambition.

Right now, I feel I have no ambition at all.... I've stopped measuring success in terms of money or your job or personality. To me, everybody is successful in their own right. Everybody's a genius in their own special way. You just have to have the right eye, but you also need to be able to think. You need to hold the reins on your first feeling when you meet somebody you don't deem "successful." If you look hard enough, you'll see that he is in his own way.

But the point is that all corollaries stemming from such intense thought are just not practical. They're not the way of the world. All those thoughts will fly around in your mind and tie themselves in knots, but you'll get nowhere. Nowhere at all.