The Wisdom of Not Thinking
When Your Best Decisions Come from Within
Hi, I’m Claudia, and I help you to face a hurried world with greater confidence in your “Power of Slow”.
You are reading the sub-section SlowPOWER of the publication Un-Rush-The Power of Slow, where I give you insights on the absurdity of rushing and impulses on how slowing down benefits your life and work.
Don’t be shy to share it with fellow rebels against the hurry culture and click the❤️ button, so more people can discover it on Substack. Thank you!
The Wisdom of Not Thinking
When Your Best Decisions Come from Within
An article about not-overthinking got me thinking.
We actually need to take more time to think (more than we currently do - because we're constantly in the "everything is too much and too fast!" mode), but we also need to not think and trust our subconscious and go with the flow.
What this means is this:
Our accumulated knowledge, insights, and thought processes - how we arrived at solutions and ideas - are stored in our subconscious. This collection of background thinking guides our instinct. By giving ourselves permission to listen to our intuition, we essentially have access to a form of compressed wisdom that lies within us. And we should pay a bit more attention to this inner place from time to time.
When a soccer player misses a penalty or a golfer botches a putt, it's because he has become "self-aware." When a professional who has years of training overthinks, he can lose the state of "flowing in physical grace" required to be successful. Perhaps Roger Federer was so frustrated against Novak Djokovic at a past Australian Open because he recognized deep down that his opponent had tapped into a resource that he, an all-time great, seems to find increasingly difficult to access:
not thinking in certain moments and following his intuition, which is fed by his lifelong tennis experience.
In our accelerated and stressed world, we often neglect the thinking process and try to cut corners to be faster and get through our task list. The result is superficial behavior in dealing with other people, hasty decisions, an indifferent attitude toward quality, and disrespectful behavior. In this regard, MORE THINKING is necessary.
On the other hand, we need to occasionally trust the place within us that we have fed with knowledge, information, and experiences, and that distinguishes us from AI, intelligent machines, and computers: Our inspirations and instincts, our creative spirit, and compassion.
We constantly let ourselves be distracted by our too many thoughts and often "over-informed" thoughts, instead of occasionally directing our attention to our inherent wisdom and common sense.
By slowing down, you can tap into your inner wisdom. Which is often smarter than the outside noise.
Inspirational stuff I compiled for you
Here is a curated list of articles/links on the topic of slowing down and living better.
STUFF
The Atlas of Emotion.
Developed by Eve Ekman, commissioned by the Dalai Lama
THOUGHTS
About Mindfulness and Manifestation
MINDFULNESS – It is the simple process of actively noticing things.
No meditation required.
MANIFESTATION – It is simply who YOU ARE as a frequency/vibration.
No steps required to manifest.
About Reading
We can't be satisfied with merely "getting the gist" of what we read. "Read attentively". Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity. -- paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius
About Paying Attention and Reality
Reality is not an objective truth, but a creative fragment, made up of what we focus our attention on. When we start paying more attention, we shape our perception, and we then also shape our world.
READING
What I am currently reading:
“Montaigne” – A biography of Montaigne, by Stefan Zweig.
A very short book portraying a writer whose life and work can be summed up by his constant posing of the question, ‘How should I live?’”
Thoughts I appreciated: “Why are you taking all this so hard? Why do you allow yourself to be attacked and bowed down by the nonsense and bestiality of your time? All this only touches your skin, not your inner self. The outside cannot take anything away from you and cannot disturb you as long as you do not allow yourself to be disturbed. The madness of time is not a real hardship as long as you retain your clarity.”
A rebel against a rushing world is someone who takes the time to think
or to listen to their intuition.
