How being a private person can develop your thinking abilities?

A woman thinking near a seashore.

Do you appreciate having some time to yourself?  

Do you benefit from reflecting on new things learned? 

Are you absorbed in efforts to broaden your understanding of matters?

 Do you like to ponder over constructive questions and problems?

Or, are you more like those persons who seem to lack the ability to think, or even feel, for themselves? 

Such persons would not, perhaps could not, enjoy their own private company. 

They seem impelled to be around others as much as possible.

It would appear that if they cannot talk to someone they cannot think for themselves. 

What would happen to such a person if confined to solitary imprisonment? 

What would happen to you?

Many persons feel that if they search long and deep within themselves, they will eventually uncover some depository of profound truth and meaning. 

It might be true that deep and persistent “soul-searching” will help us better to understand our views, tendencies, attitudes, feelings, ambitions, longings and the like.

Developing thinking abilities

Personal privacy can be a time to think, to study, to meditate, to develop thinking abilities. 

Yes, we may be born with the ability to play music or excel in athletics. 

Yet, what if we never trained such abilities? We might as well never have had them. 

The same is true with thinking abilities. 

The ability to think develops only to the extent that we feed upon information, experience and training.

Developing ability to think is not easy. 

It is real mental work. 

Let us say that we wish to develop some special thinking ability, for example, the ability to judge types of persons to a reliable degree. 

First, we think of a person, someone we know. 

That person can be seen, heard, touched and discerned with the physical senses. But does such discernment involve thinking? No.

Furthermore, as we begin to think about the person, do not our emotional reactions toward that person start interfering? 

Before we are really thinking, have we not started feeling about the person—registering likes, dislikes, respect, disrespect, trust, distrust—reacting emotionally before beginning an intellectual appraisal?

But let us say that we force ourselves simply to THINK of the person. Think of the person’s views, attitudes, behavior, abilities, accomplishments and the like. 

How well do we understand such qualities in anyone? 

Could we make logical predictions as to how the person might react under given circumstances? 

Appraising mental and emotional qualities in a person requires the ability to think. 

We find ourselves involved with intangibles beyond discernment with mere physical senses such as sight, sound and touch. 

At the same time we have to make sure that feelings have not slipped in under the guise of thoughts to throw our mental processes off track.

In order to do these necessary things we will benefit by making room in our lives for a reasonable degree of personal privacy; privacy for thinking and study and meditation.

Share this post with your social networks: