“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.” – John Ruskin.
In recent years, I have attempted to change and improve my writing dramatically, and in a number of different ways. One of the most important was my very passionate desire to inject more thoughtfulness into my writing, and then, by indirection, perhaps into the world. John Updike always wrote that this was the purpose of the writer.
But I have not always been able to achieve it, or even understand what it was.
Being thoughtful turned out to be an ambitious and difficult undertaking.
Our culture is many things, but thoughtfulness is rare, and sometimes seems outdated.
Considered stories and beliefs in the age of social media – where ill-considered thought is often the medium itself – are becoming rarer. Thoughtfulness has vanished from our politics and civic discourse, our leaders do not seem to think about things much, they just declare their fixed positions, over and over again.
The whole point of text and Facebook messaging is that one doesn’t have to think about it. You just send it. The whole point of two-party politics is to never be thoughtful: you only need to parrot the pre-determined opinion of the left or the right. No deviation of thought is permitted. The dictionary defines that as ignorance, not thoughtfulness.
In a sense, thoughtfulness is out of touch with the times, thus all the more necessary and perhaps even valuable.
I sense from my mail that people are looking for it.
In the past few months I have been getting more and more messages from people who have noticed this effort in my writing to be thoughtful. And thanked me for it.
Like most efforts, it is not always successful. But it is becoming an integral part of my writing, and my purpose for writing. To be thoughtful, I think, is to be honest, self-reflective, once in a while even helpful.
The writers I have always loved and admired – Marquez, Updike, Faulkner, Roiphe, Didion – are instinctively thoughtful, observant and reflective. They make me feel and think, they don’t just provoke or argue. Thoughtfulness is at the heart of all good writing. Good writers (and artists) reflect and consider their work, and their thoughts and feelings are reflected in their work. I see this in writing, in painting, in Maria’s quilts. The more thoughtful she is, the more diverse and interesting her work becomes.
When we are frightened it is difficult to be thoughtful, our mind doesn’t stop spinning long enough. So there is a spiritual element to thoughtfulness.
Politicians no longer seem to consider their work and ideas. The oppositional structure of the left and the right make thoughtfulness irrelevant, since no thinking is necessary for rigid positions that never evolve. The point is argument and domination, not reflection or compromise.
Thoughtfulness came late to my work. I was too angry, too anxious, too provocative and impulsive. I learned to consider my thoughts carefully, I worked at listening more actively. I rejected argument for reflection and authenticity. I wrote about me, I don’t ever tell others what to think, or write to persuade others to come to my side. Thoughtfulness is not a side.
Like Beavis & Butthead, I avoide places and people – and Facebook pages – who tell me what to think. Thus in many ways I was free to think, free of dogma and simple-minded labeling.
Gandhi wrote that thoughtfulness brought him simplicity and clarity of thought. “It’s greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts.”
I am forming the same habit.
My purpose in writing is not to convince others of what to believe and think, but to express my own thoughts and feelings in a clear way. People can take from it what they wish and need to take. They don’t need to feel attacked or co-erced.
People often say they like my writing even though they disagree with me, and I appreciate that, but the point of my writing is never to get people to agree with me. There is little point in only talking to people who agree with me, what can I learn from them? What can they learn from me?
Someday we will live in a country where no one will need to say they like someone’s work even though they sometimes disagree. Of course they will sometimes disagree, if the writer is half alive and capable of any thought at all. The great Greek philosophers always said that their purpose was disagreement, not just approval. With disagreement comes thought, with thought comes thoughtfulness.
In a sense, thoughtfulness requires coming to terms with disagreement and new ideas.
When I write something now, I pause, I take a walk, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, I do Tai Chi, I hike in the woods, I herd sheep with the dogs. I always pause to think. I put my earphones on and listen to Kanye West or Paul Simon.
Being thoughtful to me involves letting go of pre-conception, narcissism, and dogma. It demands empathy, it asks me to take myself out of my own life and head and consider myself and other things from something of a distance. I begin by remembering that we are all, essentially alike at the core, and that everyone has it worse than me, and that things that appear to make no sense usually don’t.
To be thoughtful is to be pensive, reflective, contemplative, musing, meditative, introspective, philosophical, absorbed, engrossed, rapt, even brooding. I am happy to acknowledge that I don’t know, am not sure, two cardinal sins of our political process and two-track left-and-right thinking.
Being thoughtful is, by definition, being caring, showing consideration for the needs and feelings of other people. It’s not possible to be thoughtful if you hate or dismiss everyone you disagree with.
In many ways, thoughtfulness is the very opposite of contemporary politics and communications, it goes against the ethos of Facebook and Twitter, which promote argument and judgment and complaint and funnel people into mirrors that are reflections of themselves only. When people thank a writer for being thoughtful, they are thanking him and her for caring about them, and writing in such a way that they can relate and identity with the words, even if they do disagree.
I am not so blind as to fail to see that thoughtfulness is the very opposite of the political debates and Facebook and Twitter mobs raging all around me and you, they remind me that labels and dogma and unconsidered thoughts and opinions are the very opposite of thoughtfulness. As usual, the mob and I are headed in very different directions. As always, I am very happy to be apart from the mob.
I was startled to read John Ruskin’s observation about thoughtfulness and color, but it made some sense when I thought about it. In my own life, the search for color and light reflects my great yearning to be hopeful, to be inspired and inspire, to be reminded of the beauty in the world even when the news and our own self-serving leaders are trying to persuade us that there is none.
That is the powerful of thoughtfulness.