Thinking: Without or With distractions

My friend Bruce can just sit. He is an early riser. I’m not. And most mornings, when he’s visiting, I’ll wake up to find him sitting on our couch—phone-less (he barely knows how to work his), book-less, magazine-less, newspaper-less, word-puzzle-less; immersed in silence, just looking straight ahead.

      Bruce, a retired professor, certainly reads, mostly Victorian novels. He keeps up with current events, through the PBS NewsHour and his local newspaper. He goes to movies, plays and concerts. His conversation is lively and wide-ranging. But often—and Bruce says he can do this for hours when home alone—he just sits and thinks.

      Bruce has what my in-laws used to call in Yiddish: ziztfleisch, sitting flesh. He doesn’t need to be busy cleaning, cooking, rearranging or even fidgeting. But it is more than that: Bruce doesn’t need distractions.

      When I ask Bruce what he is doing when he just sits there, he pauses for a minute then says, “I don’t know . . . thinking. Going over events in my life.” Bruce is just about 80, and his memory is razor sharp. So, there are a lot of events to choose from. “Or I’m thinking through some political issue,” he adds. “Or remembering something I’ve read or seen.”

      I, on the other hand, will only sit and just think under duress: where there’s no WIFI, and I forgot to stick a magazine in my back pocket. Part of the problem is that my memory is butter-knife dull. But the truth is, and this explains much of the difference between me and my friend Bruce, like many of us I am addicted to distraction.

      I need an Ezra Klein podcast on while I’m doing the dishes. While waiting for my wife to figure out which coat to put on, I click on Twitter (aka “X”) or one of its less obnoxious but equally jumpy competitors. I listen to the new Stones album while I walk and a Bill Simmons podcast when I lie down to nap.

      I’m not sure this makes me a less thoughtful person. Indeed, my friends and family joke about my tendency to come up with a theory to explain even the most minor occurrences: our failure, for example, on a particular corner, at a particular time, to find a taxi. My friends and family are also, I should note, alert to the limitations of my theories.

      But somehow, for me, thinking—of whatever quality—manages to get done. Despite the noise? Stimulated by the noise?

      Bruce thinks in the calm he finds at the end of a couch. Many people turn to the peace and quiet of nature when they want to think. One of humankind’s great thoughts, for example, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, was hatched, as many large thoughts have been hatched, when he left the physics institute in Copenhagen where he had been working and went for a walk in a park.

      Here’s a theory: In this age of AirPods, texts, Spelling Bee and TikTok, distractions are omnipresent and quiet is elusive. For the sake of humanity’s future, we better hope that my way of thinking works as well as Heisenberg’s and Bruce’s.