Interruptible Thought

• In the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, society has become so determined that no one should feel inferior that they force equality on everyone. Dancers who are too graceful wear heavy sandbags to weight them down, and intelligent people wear devices that startle them periodically with a loud noise so that any thoughts they might be having will be driven out of their minds.

• While it is not forced on us, we live in a world that is full of interruptions. We are constantly interrupted by other people, the media or just everyday life, and it is very difficult to find large expanses of quiet time to think. As a result, we need to find ways to keep a line of thought going even when it is interrupted.

• The key to doing that is to record your thoughts in such a way that you can quickly re-engage with your ideas when your next opportunity to think comes around. It should easy to answer the question “now, where was I?” I use a Notebook, but there are certainly other ways including voice recording, computer or phone notes, or even drawings. The important thing is for you to find the technique that works for you and use it so you don’t waste time going over the same old territory every time you sit down to think.

• When your intention is to keep a line of thought going, the things you record may be different than other notes you might keep. Usually, we write down the results of our thinking, our conclusions, but my notebooks are full of questions, conjectures, hypotheses and half-thoughts. They record my thought processes and only small parts are devoted to my conclusions. That way, I am able to pick up where I was simply by reading a few pages back.

Therefore: