Thinking and Doing

Over with the flu a week now; I generously passed it over to Pei-Yin, my housemate from Taiwan. Sorry Pei!

The last couple of days I am struggling with a diagram I am trying to draw in order to visualise better (for me and my examiners) the theoretical basis of my thesis. It's a pain! At the moment it looks like a clock; it draws on the idea that everyday life is a time-space concept that always moves and never stays still, yet it is repetitive, routinized and boring as the minutes that go by. Drawing circles and lines reminds me of geometry classes at secondary school; using the ruler and the other instrument that the english word slips my mind right now, to make perfect circles and triangles. I quite liked geometry, although I was not particularly good; but I was enjoying the thinking behind it.

I suppose this is the problem: the 'thinking'. Too much thinking nowadays, that much that the last chunk has lasted four years and some months: thinking of a single thing, my research. I think that doing a PhD makes one addicted to thinking, (over)analysing, critiquing, and so on. I find myself always thinking about anything and everything. If you ask me to mown the lawn (or lawn the mown? I am always confused about the right order in this phrase), I would probably start thinking first about the strategy I would follow: from which side to start, what movement I should be doing; then about how the mownlawner (or the lawnmowner?) works and what is the purpose of working in this way. Then I would probably start thinking about planting tomatoes and onions in the garden and it is high possible that I would start googling about where I can find the right seeds. Eventually, I will do the job, after having considered everything that I needed not to.

Not much a man of action or an 'actionman' you would say. Sometimes, though, when I daydream, I do not think about thinking, but I remember times of my childhood action: collecting figs from random fig-trees in random small roads in the countryside of my home town. Or, climbing on the trees with my brothers and cousins to get wild plums, eat as much as we can and then start running, either because the landowner would go after us shouting that he would tell our parents or simply because we needed the loo...Or go secretly and pour must (the juice of grapes before it becomes wine) in large glasses and drink it to the last drop; and then being shouted at by our uncles and aunts.

You will say, well times change and as a child we were doing things without much thinking, while now we need to think before we act. Perhaps this is the price of being adults...

However, what worries me is that if you put me now in a vineyard, instead of storming to try the fruits, I would probably consider doing unobtrusive observation of the grapes' maturing process, possibly some in-depth interviews with the foxes and rabbits of the area and perhaps some nice focus groups with the donkeys and mules that stroll down the fields.

I worry that things do not taste the same anymore...