It’s better not to think too much.
I never thought this but it’s true. Try and you’ll see.
Thinking is progressive. It begins where you are, with what you know, and ventures outward, into the unknown. It is the opposite of recitation. Reciting – a creed or any formula – one treads a worn path leading comfortably home. “I believe” means I do not think.
Reciting is obeying, singing the notes as written, no variance allowed. Thinking, one loses the tune, assurance even that a tune exists. What if there is no tune, only chaos, cacophony, void, no lullabies to console? What if all you knew you knew turns out wrong? What if there is no Santa Claus, no love, no God?
Sanity is a shelter framed by axioms. An axiom is a proposition generally conceded, not subject to revision – a mother’s love, say, or the Ten Commandments. Onto axioms you hammer postulates. Axioms are what engineers call load-bearing. Remove them and your shelter topples.
Robert Frost wrote a great poem about the thrill and peril of thinking. It’s a sonnet called “Into My Own,” and he placed it first in his first book, so he must have liked it.
“One of my wishes,” says the poet,
is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
The poet wants his world to be bigger than his received truths, those “dark trees, so old and firm they scarcely show the breeze.” Restless in his ancestors’ homestead, he hankers for more.
If his wish – for a wider world – were granted, he’s convinced
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
What young person with gumption hasn’t felt this way, bravely leaving home (though not so bravely, for he “steals away”), confident they can cope with whatever comes.
The prospect of liberation giddies him. He’s outa here – catch him if you can!
I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
I find this third quatrain almost intolerably tender. In the second, our poet brimmed with bravado – “fearless!” But now, hear the uncertainty niggling into his assurance. While he can’t foresee why he “should e’er turn back,” the thought itself admits that possibility. Then in the next two lines, as loneliness nips, he envisions a posse of loved ones pursuing him, because they miss him and want to know if he still loves them. Yes, we hanker to leave home, but it’s not as easy as we imagine.
The concluding couplet delivers a shock, a punchline with real punch. If his loved ones ever caught up with him, would they find him transformed by his adventure? Not a bit of it. He’s the same kid, only less restless, more accepting of the old wisdom:
They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
Can it be he’s learned nothing from living? No, he’s learned a lot. He’s learned that we carry our core beliefs too deep for doubt to dispel. We know what we know, thank goodness. And we should cherish that assurance and avoid thinking ourselves into insanity.
Too often these days our world feels crazed, forgetful how humans should be.