Many thoughts race through my mind. I fact, I wish I had more time to think — in my life, and particularly at work, I often default to my intuition (which, together with common sense, I see as a kind of cache for the thought process) rather than taking the time to step back and think. It’s a pity because (a) I don’t think my intuition is particularly strong and (b) I like thinking.

Recently I started making myself think (and use this blog to record these thoughts and hopefully have other people provide their feedback on them). As I think, my mind naturally collects these thoughts into themes and climbs up the abstraction ladder. Very quickly I get to the metaphysical, the highly abstract concepts and then I get lost and confused. I start doubting everything and asking myself existential questions. This is why I really want to come up with some kind of framework to help me think about the right things, so I don’t feel this anxiety.

I mentioned already that I think the most important thing to think about is one’s purpose in life. I still need to prove it (to myself), though, and hopefully come up with a way to do this well. And perhaps purpose is not even the most important thing to think about, perhaps there is something even more fundamental.

The search for the most fundamental question is on.

The first stage of this search will be for me to sieve through the chaos of my thoughts and extract bits of information which might be useful in my thinking. For example, I intuitively feel that there are some principles I want to abide by. Maybe these are the wrong principles, but it’s a good start. Once I have all this stuff written down, I’ll stare at the piece of paper and then actually think about the framework. It’s just really hard to do with a blank piece of paper in front of me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 15:22 and is filed under purpose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.