Just because I can think it, that doesn’t mean it exists. Or that it even can exist outside my thinking.

So sometimes I’m afraid to think. Because once you get me started, I can’t seem to stop. Until I have to. Which I guess means until I die. And I don’t want to die until I have to.

Thinking is like the perpetual motion machine. Once you start it, it’s on its own and won’t stop. Because it can’t, because it was built that way.

People have thought forever, we say forever, about limits. We joke about “the Universe and everything,” and “to the Universe and beyond.” I remember the first year in college, they removed the limits and told us that’s what they were doing, setting us free.

A student asked the Math Professor, “Is there an equation that would account for everything in the universe?” The Professor said, “Yes, but it would have to be as big as the universe for a point-to-point correspondence.” I thought, “That’s pretty good thinking. But he’s telling us as much as he dares, or letting us know the current level of his own thinking, but because he’s the Professor and surely must know the limitations of what he said, he was leaving it up to us to keep going. If the universe means “everything there is” which must include everything there can be or ever was, including what isn’t here anymore or never was and never will be, then the “equation,” like a point-to-point corresponding map, would mean there are two universes, the original everything, and its image. Which means there is a larger universe to encompass the two smaller ones, which means…which means the universe is and isn’t everything. It’s a word for what we want to say so we can think we understand, which means we’d better watch our language. Because we know that when we put something into words, to try to contain it, to get it right, we know it’s only approximate, that reality is “beyond words.” Just the way mathematical equations use symbols, like words, to represent and contain a range beyond expression.

Because I’m not good enough at math, and I wasn’t doing my physics homework because it was too hard, demanded me to think harder, and I’m lazy. But also because I knew where it was going, where it would lead, what it would demand of me, how it would change my thinking, the way I thought, the way I was allowed and able and required to think.

I know the pleasures of thinking. The games. Verbal games, puns, multiple entendres. The games of science and math to see how far and deep we can go, to understand, explain, reproduce, and with engineering, to control. The process is fun, and it’s fun to win.

I’m comfortable enough with the multiple ways of playing with thought. English with words, covering the realm of feeling, expanding to include art, relying on extensive metaphor. Then the not necessarily exclusive realm of thought, the untried, the comfort of knowing, of thinking we know.

People proclaim a dichotomy, heart vs. head, but that not need be mutually exclusive. Artists can think, scientists can feel, and both deal with the same universe big enough to be seen and experienced in multiple ways, all ways possible and impossible, everything, and then some.
It breaks my heart to look back and see what I went through to get to where I am today. I’m still twisting and turning from the purge of inherited imposed preconceptions. To clear my mind and make it ready to work.

And now, the media from the other room intrude upon my train of thought. I was just getting ready to think. Even though I thought I knew where thinking would lead, I thought, after coffee and breakfast, I’d have enough strength and energy and patience to give it a go again, to see how the ramble would meander this time. But the world, that outside-of-myself world I resign myself to take as real, does it again, gives me the stuff to think about, the way things are going, the way I’m forced to follow what I’ve already resigned myself to accepting as reality. They’re talking about the law again, and juries, and evidence, and a lot of “what if,” and doubt and whether it’s reasonable, and the dangers of decisions and conclusions, and my flesh starts crawling again over my nerves, and in desperation I finish my coffee and go outside, into the sunlight which is still there. For now.