Contemplation
Contemplate new information or ideas to integrate them into your personal universe.
practicing Mindfulness provides us with richer experience from which we can learn, but the meaning of that experience is not always obvious. We need to to make an effort to untangle the truth from our experience.
We encounter potential insights all the time, but if we don’t take time to consider them, they are lost.
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Contemplation is what we often mean when we say “thinking” in everyday language. It’s an internal process of pondering big questions, of mulling over ideas, of being pensive. It’s following a line of thought. It’s being curious about something, asking yourself questions and trying to answer them. It’s more general than Rethinking, but rethinking is a form of contemplation.
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Generally, the process of thinking, more accurately called cognition, is much more active than the scene depicted in Rodan’s familiar sculpture, The Thinker. In the macro sense, thinking includes learning, having conversations, experimenting, building prototypes and testing. In that way, Design is analogous to thinking. But contemplation is more personal. It’s the activity you need to do to process new information and ideas and integrate them into your Personal Universe. You can think of it as rearranging the furniture of your experience.
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For most, contemplation requires a quiet location, body and mind. And there’s a balance. Get too relaxed and you might go to sleep. Disengage your mind too much and you’ll Daydream. I think it’s telling that Rodan’s figure is sitting, with his head down, resting on his hand. Looking down tends to move our attention inward. Looking out into space invites daydreaming.
Therefore:
Contemplate new information or ideas to integrate them into your personal universe.
Contemplation doesn’t require sitting: walking seems to create good conditions for it—Walk— and combining contemplation with some mode of expression, like writing, can help keep your mind engaged—Thought Flow