On the bus home from work today I stared out the window as I crossed the Granville bridge and smiled to myself as I reflected on the beauty of our city. It’s moments like this that I feel like my thinking is clear and I am able to calm my mind, even if only for a few seconds. Out of nowhere I remember, “I have a reflection for D.Studio due tomorrow morning”. Automatically my brain switches gears and I jump into a critical thinking mode that is very analytical. I attempt to recall the topic and proceed to think about what I want to say, how long it will take me to say it, and when I can complete the task before tomorrow at 7am. I placed the task on my mental to-do then began to think about my other courses to ensure that I wasn’t forgetting about any other deadlines. My thought pattern changed from expansive and calm to precise and efficient in the blink of an eye.
Flash forward to 11:00pm when I sit down to write this reflection… I open a blank word document and begin to write down point-form notes on “how I think”. The following are some of the points I started with:
“- Analytical – Detail oriented – Thinking = depends on the context and environment”
I stopped after a few points and realized that this is how I thought my brain worked but I’m not actually as analytical as I thought. This is the moment that I thought about my moment of clarity on the bus. “I am a creative thinker sometimes…” I think to myself. “I love big-picture brainstorming and visual representations and I must admit that the free-writing exercise last class felt pretty darn good. Interesting.” I think. “How on earth am I ever going to express this in a reflection?” I ask. “Just write down what you just thought, it’s a reflection”
I have always had this perception that I have a calculated, compartmentalized thought pattern but I think there is a flaw in this perception. When I solve a problem I’m detail oriented yet a big picture thinker. When I sit down to write a paper I often start with a mindmap. One of the walls in my apartment is full of colour-coded post-it notes. I’m actually a pretty visual thinker. I think differently in different situations. This reflection has certainly helped me realize that.
I apologize because this reflection is very unorganized. I jump from past tense to present tense, my thoughts are all over the place, and I have far too many grammatical errors. I felt that fixing everything up would kind of defeat the purpose and wouldn’t be an accurate representation of “how I think” because my “intense analytical thought” is due to all the editing and fixing I’ve done in the past. I’m not pretending I’m not a critical thinker. I am just opening my eyes to the fact that sometimes I’m creative, unorganized and visual without even realizing it.
How quickly our minds hijack the serenity and calmness sometimes! I challenge your point on how you switched to efficiency in that moment, since often when we are overwhelmed with thoughts and to-do’s I think we lose the ability to join dis-similar ideas and create something novel. Sometimes of course that super precision is great for productivity, and maybe even for insight. Are you familiar with the concept of flow in psychology? Basically when we are adequately challenged and adequately aroused intellectually we can go into a hyper-productive state where time flies by, we have a rush from loving the work we are doing, and we simply “flow”. Sir Ken Robinson also calls this being in The Element (see associated TED Talk and book). Finally, I appreciate your blog post is in the same style as your thinking, namely non-linear. I do challenge you to think, how can you present it in a way that shows the non-linearity but in a linear written format? Maybe an info graphic like Joyce…