Thinking about thinking

It was all going splendidly. I had bought a new house, and been promoted. Life was good.

Until one sunny May afternoon I am in my car sitting at traffic lights when the driver behind me has a ‘momentary lapse of concentration’, and runs into me at 35 mph. My car looks as if Superman has punched it

At first I am fine, I drive the car home, and two hours later I’m sitting at my desk making notes for my insurance company. Suddenly I can only move my eyes. This passes, fortunately! – But over the next two weeks I find can move less and less.

The next few years were interesting and I learned a lot. Not least of which I was learnt how to walk again. Or more accurately I was taught how to walk again by a physiotherapist. Since although I could walk, I walked badly, in a weird crablike motion. I couldn’t walk in a straight line, or for any length of time.

I remember at one point my physio said to me,

People are never taught how to walk. They learn by themselves, and as a result many of them walk poorly. I make a lot of money repairing the damage that this causes when they get into their 40s and 50s.

Many years later it occurred to me that walking isn’t the only thing we teach ourselves to do poorly with the resulting damage only becoming apparent decades later. As a child, I was never taught how to think. I was taught what to think, but never really how to think.
Do you know how you think. Do know there are various different ways to think. Logically, creatively, systemically, the list goes on with each form of thinking having its own strengths and weaknesses.

For me, ways of thinking are like tools in a toolbox, with different tools for different purposes. Different ways of thinking can help you identify and then deal with different situations. Otherwise if you only have a hammer in your toolbox then everything will look like a nail.