Over time, interests ebb and flow, as do the questions that surround them. Being a philosophy major, it is in my nature to question anything and everything that comes my way. I wonder about occurrences as large as the blizzards that enveloped Brown’s campus this semester, a personal attack against this Midwesterner who grew up bombarded with negative temperatures. Other moments—as small as the glint in someone’s eye as I pass them on the street, or the dainty swaying of the trees while walking to class, almost as if they’re ushering all the students to congregate on the Main Green—raise similar questions for me. At parties, I am the one to stand to the side and ponder the true meaning of life and how this particular experience accounts for the overall status quo of the world while people yell, dance, and play beer pong. At least I think I am. This last statement seems to sum up the majority of the thought processes that regularly cycle through my head. Maybe that’s what life is supposed to amount to: discovering what it is by living it.
The relation between experience and analysis has always been tricky for me. Maybe there is no underlying meaning behind the rain that showers itself into oblivion, while I, too, trudge through resulting rivers on the street, feeling the weight of my responsibilities, actions, and place in the world. Maybe the line between theory and reality have blurred for me—how things theoretically should be put into place versus the way they scramble, almost comically disordered, into their positions in the world. Are my expectations too high for my reality? Do I spend too much time in the universe I’ve crafted in my head and slowly, almost subconsciously, become out of touch with that which pans out around me?
Another common topic of chronic overthinking is other people’s perceptions/opinions of you, something of which I’ve had my fair mental share. Case in point: I have a distinct memory from third grade of being convinced that the group of boys trading Pokémon cards was secretly conspiring against me. Only by looking back with the wisdom of an almost 20-year-old, can I see that perhaps this pseudo Pokemon card club didn’t have any ulterior motives against me and my bright green Creek Valley Elementary School Carnival T-shirt. Perhaps they truthfully didn’t hear me when I choked out something akin to “dyew wantdkra trfe wifme” (in my head, it sounded like a clear “Want to trade cards with me?”), purposely not making eye contact with any of them. Similarly, maybe the cashier at the grocery store didn’t think it was enormously awkward when I fumbled in my bag for what felt like eons before realizing I had left my coupons at home. Finally, maybe it is fine that I chose not to say hi to that one acquaintance whom I feel obligated to acknowledge every time I pass them on the street, knowing full well of our mutual desire to not say anything at all. Spending as much time thinking about thinking as I do, it’s fascinating how one can almost start to see the way other people think as well.
The narrative I’ve crafted in my head requires every new experience, interaction, and encounter to fit neatly into the general framework of the world as I’ve experienced it. Yet, as I’m navigating the last year of my teenagehood, I’m starting to realize that this framework is less helpful than I thought it was. This realization started with the discovery that it is almost irritatingly clear when I encounter something that indeed does not fit into this framework (which, as I’m discovering, seems to happen a lot). The conclusion: Is it, then, truly acceptable to experience without analyzing? The slightly embarrassed, post-Pokémon-club-rejection third grader in me says no; the older, hopefully wiser version says signs point to yes.
Maybe there is some special meaning behind everything. Maybe Plato and Sartre are right that human beings are forever walking contradictions of themselves and thus can never embody the form of knowledge that is simply itself without having an opposite. Contradictions exist in the weather—the dusting of snow falling somberly on top of buildings, coloring them white and pale, after days of sunshine which brought out the sunshine in everyone. They exist in the thoughts in one’s head and the expression on one’s face, whether or not one complements the other. There seems to be as much to be said in the unspoken as in what is said outright; being a chronic overthinker puts one into a constant state of thinking between the lines.
I pass buildings with walls dotted with flowers and wonder if those flowers exist in the crevices of my brain, inhibiting some neural pathway and resulting in my overthinking nature. I glance at the cathedral-like brick layouts in Sayles and wonder if some monk in a cathedral hundreds of years ago felt the same sense of awe as I do. I wonder if people act out of the same pursuit of some sort of drawn-out goal, if they’re motivated by a single value in life, if some live carried away by emotions, if some don’t.
Another thing I’ve realized while at Brown is, as interesting and invigorating as living in one’s head can be, it is not the most practical method of going about one’s lived reality. Case in point: Perhaps I shouldn’t have gotten irrationally angry at my physics professor after receiving a pitifully low exam score when I had spent most of the lectures wondering what had caused our joints to evolve in the way that they did. Perhaps it is better to think that people mean what they say and that most don’t have malicious intentions. “Perhaps” seems to be the way that I go about living my life. Yet “perhaps” doesn’t write a paper for me, submit job applications for me, or talk to my philosophy professor during office hours about the nature of morality for me.
“Perhaps” has been both a blessing and a curse. But upon living experience after experience at Brown, something that I always seem to return to, even in the midst of chronic overthinking, is that one scene from Kung Fu Panda where Master Oogway advises a forlorn Po who is debating quitting his Dragon Warrior training: “Quit, don’t quit. Noodles, don’t noodles. You are too concerned with what was and what will be. There is a saying: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” Maybe the meaning of life will always be contingent upon a maybe. Maybe this truth is completely acceptable—maybe the lesson is that it will indeed all work out.
