When I was a teenager, I felt I was having deep thoughts when I was writing an essay for English class that explored various ways of killing myself.
For most of my life, I considered deep thoughts to be the deep-down-in-the-hole thoughts of despair and destruction. I wondered about the meaning of life and our place in the universe only when I was depressed, at which time they didn’t have much meaning to me at all.
When I was feeling up, I was too busy living life to care about the meaning of it. The manic side of my bipolar nature filled me with more ideas (and the energy to carry them out) than I could possibly accomplish in one lifetime.
I had things to do and places to go and people to meet.
No time for deep thoughts.
Now I see that there are other possibilities. Perhaps a deep thought is one that I can’t answer with logic or science or history. Perhaps it calls from some part of me that has been sleepwalking through life.
I was with a small group of people Sunday morning meditating and discussing a book by Osho. We read a few paragraphs and talked about what they meant. As an English major and past teacher of literature and writing, I look for meaning by parsing the sentences and connecting them to the surrounding context.
I had a feeling, however, that I wasn’t getting Osho’s meaning—yet. His thoughts were deep thoughts. They were not on the surface. A close reading of a few paragraphs was not going to tell me much.
One man in our group is a parent of young children. He interpreted the paragraphs from his life experience—first reacting to his parents as a child and now trying to be a better parent himself.
Others interpreted the paragraphs based on their wider reading and studies, putting Osho’s words in the context of others’ words.
I tried to mediate the various points of view, connecting one with the other, but as the discussion twisted into further corners and closets, entangling us all in a maze of words, I realized it was necessary to stop.
