The Joy of Thinking Radically
Let’s take a break from the dumpster fire of news and get a little woo woo.
On the desk in my office, I have this little crystal paper weight with a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote:
To the illuminated mind, the world burns and sparkles with light.
I got it during my first visit to the Hotel Del Coronado—an inspiring piece of historical architecture on a wealthy stretch of beach in San Diego, where the air literally smells like chocolate (they maintain a bourgie confectionary store on the resort grounds).
I’ve been to “The Del” half a dozen times since, but that first time was at the peak of the great-recession Obama years—a weird moment in history when we all felt a mix of hope and desperation, as the cleavage between haves and have-nots was opening ever wider before our eyes. Anyone with a mortgage had an immense fear of falling. Anyone with student debt had an immense fear of homelessness. Some of us indulged in the escapism of Revenge and other shows about gratuitously rich people even as that lifestyle slipped further out of reach. Others became part of the Occupy movement.
Anyway, I’m not the kind of person who just buys paper weights—I was in an intensely romantic headspace when I saw the quote. It grabbed me because I took Emerson to mean that an inquisitive mind—one that’s alive to the world—is one that can find something interesting in everything. I saw it as an affirming challenge. If I find something boring, maybe my curiosity just isn’t burning and sparkling brightly enough.
There’s part of me that will always believe this. To a great extent, that’s why I need this platform. Curiosity is a drive, and drive gets you out of bed and makes you open that book, or perhaps plants you in front of your Microsoft Word document.
But I’ve also realized that some things register as boring because they’re unoriginal, trivial, distracting, poorly done, or familiarly wrong. Sure, you can find an angle to make something more stimulating than it appears—a sign of genius, surely—but sometimes the problem is the thing itself and not you!
This is especially important to keep in mind if you work a job you hate to pay for a life where you’re scraping by. If that’s you, you’re not the problem, the system that leaves you to choose between boring job or death is the problem. Can you imagine telling someone working in an Amazon warehouse, where you’re not even allowed to take a piss, that their job would burn and sparkle brightly if only they were more curious!?