Ik zie je zitten, en ik zie dat je niet na durft te denken. Je bent zo bang om aan iets negatiefs te denken, aan iets engs, dat je denkt dat er iets gebeurt. Dat je er ziek van wordt.

I see you sitting there, and I can see that you don't dare to think. You're so afraid of thinking about something negative, something scary, that you believe something will happen if you do. That you'll become ill because of it.

Note to Self

You're afraid to think.

You think: if I sit down with my thoughts, I'll end up thinking about this or that, that terrible thing that happened back then.

Or: if I think negative thoughts, I'll get sick. That's not good for my body.

You're trapped in a prison of beliefs.

Kids Need More Time to Think

We live in a very hasty society. This week, I worked out 7 times. I worked. I cleaned my house. I barely had energy for social activities. I am also buying a new house. I want to do creative stuff.

I know it's my own fault, but I see it with myself, and everybody else, that we are in a rush. Every minute needs to be spent efficiently, as if time is something you need to maximize.

So, we barely have any time left.

Thinking has a very bad reputation. If you think and daydream a lot at school, then people give you pills that make you stop dreaming and make you sit still.

If you are a Buddhist, you are scared that you leave the here and now. You can't leave the here and now. Stop focusing on your breathing. The reason why your mind lets you think is because thinking is healthy and essential.

I think a lot of people don't like thinking because it probably goes something like this. If I lock you in a room with your thoughts, you get scared that you are going to think about this and that, those traumatic things. And you think that negative thinking is bad for your body. If you combine those two, you have a recipe for disaster.

If I think all night about something horrific, this doesn't make my body sick at all. If you understand that, you never have to be scared of another thought ever again.

Take time to think. I often wake up and spend 30 minutes thinking only, without doing anything else. This is not a mandatory thing, like working out, but it helps to empty your head. By thinking, you actually remove thoughts from your head.

Thinking is very interactive. At first, you maybe spend days banging your head against the wall, almost paralyzed, because you have to practice thinking first. You get better and better over time. It's like worrying. When you worry a lot, you get better at worrying, and after a while, you stop worrying about certain things, because you have spent so much time worrying about them that it becomes boring in a way. It loses its grip on you.

I love this shit. After a while, the quality of your thoughts goes up, and they become like paintings, like physical things in the physical world, like an AR reality on top of this reality, like drawing in the sky.

Good thinking is more like skateboarding or freerunning. It's fast, playful, playing-the-piano-ish. It has motion in it. It's not sitting on a bench looking interesting.