You can’t hear anything new while you’re talking. Thinking works the same way.
Hello fellow traveller,
I was listening to a beautiful track the other day with an old Alan Watts lecture laid over the music. One insight really struck me.
He said that if you talk all the time, you never hear what anyone else has to say. You end up with nothing to talk about except your own conversation.
Then he said the same is true of thinking.
The chatter
By thinking, Watts meant the constant talking to yourself inside your head. The commentary, the plans, the replays, the conversations you rehearse before they happen.
Do that all the time and all you’ve got to think about is your own thinking. You become insular. There’s no space for anything new to emerge.
I know that voice well. In my CEO years, fuelled by adrenaline and running from one fire to the next, it barely stopped. Thinking..control..action..reaction…
Saying less
I’ve noticed the same thing in my own journey. The most useful thing I’ve learned to do is say and think less. Fewer frameworks. More space. Letting a silence sit instead of rushing to fill it.
And in that space, I often hear something I couldn’t hear while my mind was busy.
Watts put it simply: you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about.
Leaves aren’t green
He had a lovely example. Say the word “leaf” and most of us picture a flat green shape with a neat outline. No real leaf looks like that. Look closely and there are a hundred colours in it.
The label gets in the way of the seeing. Once you stop naming things, you start to see them. Buddhism has a version of this too: the story starts when we add the label. And every label brings its own bias, which can be both limiting and wrong.
Try this
Watts suggested the simplest way in is to listen.
Close your eyes for two minutes. Let yourself hear everything around you as if it were music. The traffic, the birds, the hum of the fridge. Don’t name the sounds. Let them come and go.
When the thinking starts up again, and it will, go back to listening.
Try it once a day for a week. At your desk, on the train, in the garden before the house wakes up. Notice what turns up in the space.
Thinking has built a great deal for most of us. Careers, businesses, whole lives. It just can’t be the only voice in the room.
There’s a line often attributed to Einstein:
“The rational mind is a servant. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
When did you last stop talking to yourself long enough to hear something new?
Best,
Hugh
You’ve lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.
If the chatter has got loud and you’d like help finding some space and clarity in it, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we’d have together. Let’s talk.
P.S. If you fancy listening to the track, here’s the Spotify link. Let me know how you find it.
