We live in a noisy world. Noise disturbs and disorders our cognition. This twofold interruption—disturbance being the shaking of our thoughts and disorder being the consequent disarray, the placing of thoughts where they do not belong—requires a twofold resolution. First, we have to block the noise. Second, we have to learn to inquire.
Blocking the Noise
The first thing we must do to organize and re-order our thoughts is to block out the noise. I do not mean that we need to create meditation rooms or spaces, that we need to live like monks (though we might want that)! Nor does it simply mean “setting aside time” for thinking, reflecting, contemplating, or for “focused work”. All these might be useful instruments; but the noise of the world which today disrupts us, while it may come from the outside, takes up residence in our minds and hearts.
The easiest example of this “noise”, of course, is the smartphone. You may look at it for only 15, 30, 80 seconds at a time: but what you see stays with you, and what you see, more often than not, disturbs or disrupts your thinking somehow. Even if you are not fully conscious of this disruption, those little inklings at the back of your mind stick with you. Noise can also come from the news, be it televised or read in an old-fashioned paper; from our email inboxes (a great source of noise even if we successfully ignore our phones, so long as we sit at or with computers); or from various social relationships (friends, family, coworkers, etc.). While some of these may spark our thoughts, their present-day constancy—especially through digital media—prove very disturbing to our process of thinking.
The only way truly to block the noise, then, is to form a habit of focus. Here, by “habit”, I don’t mean something you do unconsciously—like tapping your fingers when annoyed or drinking coffee every morning—but rather a way of holding yourself. To hold yourself with focus means keeping your mind on the objects under consideration and not responding to other cues for action, not being seized by the objects of your environment: that blinking light on your phone or red dot, the movement of the clock (“Oh, I’ve been at this for 25 minutes, I can take a break now!” – sorry Pomodoro enthusiasts), the ever-present-possibility of a new tab or a new browser window, and so on and on.
Learning to Inquire
I chose the world “organize” for the title of this post, initially, because it is likely to perform better in search engine optimization. But the term “organize” lacks something compared to “order”. For things to be “organized” is, most literally, for them to form a fitting whole. but our thinking is mostly something incomplete. We order our thoughts by structuring them towards the production of something that can be taken as a whole. The act of ordering, that is, puts the parts where they best fit. Organization presumes we have a vision of the whole already, and simply need to put the parts where they belong.
Put in other words, we do not have to figure out where things belong when we organize. It might be obscured from us and we might have to work to discover it, but the plan of organization is already there. Ordering, by contrast, leads us towards organization: it finds the order of the parts.
There are a lot of tools—physical and digital alike—that are good for organization. You can find countless apps and notebooks, planners, and the like, which enable you to organize your thoughts. But what tools can we use for ordering our thoughts? The key to answering this question is realizing that tools or instruments are always secondary to our habits. We develop habits of ordering our thought simultaneous with habits of focus: for these are the habits of asking questions and keeping questions before us. We might ask ourselves, for instance, why we are doing some task—as I might with writing this post. I can answer this quickly: to demonstrate some of the insightful thinking I bring to our difficulties.
But I may get sidetracked from this why; I might start thinking about marketing, or how specifically I can promote it via social media, or through search engine optimization (“should I title it ‘organize’ or ‘order’? Or both?!”). Losing track of the why, I might deviate in the constitution of the what. Consequently I could start throwing in more “catchphrases” and putting headings and subheadings into the post that are likelier to snag a passing-by web-surfer (say, someone bored at work and looking to gain some personal enrichment).
But in so doing, I would lose the ordering of the post. The what would no longer fit the why—even as I do need somehow to get your attention.
The truth of the matter is that very few of us are good at asking questions, especially today. Public schooling does much to dissuade students from pursuing the inquiries which arise in the course of study; and the easy, ever-present access of search engines has given us shortcuts to answers without making us learn how to formulate well their questions. In consequence, our habit of questioning suffers.
(If you’d like to learn how to question, I can help with that.)
No Tricks: Just Trials
Developing these habits, especially after long years of neglect, can be daunting and difficult. But they are all the more necessary today, given how noisy our worlds have become. There are no shortcuts or tricks; just a trial and error process through which we strive continually to improve our bearing, our “self-holding”. Just remember that you do not have to go it alone!
Continuum Philosophical Insight 