The good we wish for often proves our bane. – Milton

When I took up thinking as a hobby, I had no idea where my hobby would lead.

This can happen in retirement. Commencing a pastime light-heartedly, we become engrossed.

I’d always thought; any human does; it’s no distinction. No more is it boasting to say, “I like to fish.” My thinking had been practical: solving problems, forming plans, articulating opinions. Same with walking: I was always walking somewhere, never for the joy.

If you practice thinking, you get better at it. This seems a truism, but many would dispute it. Aren’t their thoughts as valid as the next guy’s? Who am I to judge!

To enjoy thinking is not to argue one’s good at it. I enjoy backgammon, too, but plenty of players leave me slack-jawed with amazement. I don’t doubt that Plato, Augustine, Hegel, Wittgenstein and their hulking ilk were world-class thinkers, but I’ll never know, they’re too far out of my league.

My thinking is casual, affable, not too strenuous. Nailing a truth doesn’t tempt me; true enough’s OK by me. I think to jaw with pals, not flummox the pros.  Don’t worry me with epistemology or metaphysics – gobbledygook! Worse, many of the hotshots in those departments can’t write their way out of a paper bag (speaking of prose). My dismissive attitude’s self-defensive admittedly; humans tend to deprecate what we cannot master; but hey, I’m doing this for fun, not to bag a prize.

I expected thinking to deepen, not alter, my awareness. I figured my meanderings would bring me home. As did Robert Frost:

That’s not what happened. Seeing – and saying what I saw – turned my reality upside down and me inside out. Humans, far from what I’d thought, were something else entirely. And this discovery was no ecstatic Eureka.

Our species weren’t the paragons I’d been promised. Read the old stories: after making humans, God gloated. He “saw everything He had made and behold it was very good.”  What maker doesn’t envy such satisfaction! Not just good, but very good!

Turns out God (if this account’s accurate), like many a rookie writer, overvalued his result. Were He all-wise and all-knowing, having released humans from their kiln, He’d have gasped aghast, “What have I produced!”

The politics of our moment nudged my thinking in this direction. We humans were making a mess of things – and notwithstanding our material wellbeing, were fulminous to boot. Could it be, if we didn’t change our ways, we’d make our planet toxic to our descendants? Was this “very good”?

Rome and its saints reinforced these revelations. Saints were not losers, as my Protestant boyhood sniffed, but winners, supplying solace and earning honor by their exertions. Neither was God a crutch for cripples, but a vitamin supplement to boost our performance.

Puppy Henry preached a similar sermon. Not just my comic sidekick, he was funny, happy, forgiving, cherished and all-around adorable. His worldview differed radically and irreconcilably from mine – and he was likely right. Was such a creature lesser?

If humans are not a blessing but a threat to the world we supervise (for now), we should be treated differently: not confidently, but warily, as one might a teenager who has no idea he’s “cruisin’ for a bruisin’”. However endearing our brio, we should be talked to “in no uncertain terms” about our murky prospects and perilous mistakes. Instead of preening, we should think.