Stop doing, just think and listen to your own thoughts

Written by Bo Swindell
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 23:00

Backpacking in Patagonia is funny because it’s a circuit. You take a bus somewhere and spend three to seven days trekking or kayaking or hiking or bike riding, horsebackriding or fishing, and then hop on another bus with a lot of familiar faces and ride to the next stop. And the bus rides are 15 to 30 hours long.

There is nothing anyone can do to stay entertained for that long, whether reading, watching outdated movies dubbed in Spanish, sleeping or listening to music (mainly because no iPod battery will last that long). Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from my pictures, those bus rides were just as vital in my backpacking trip as the trekking and biking. I could never fill 30 hours by doing something; most of the time I just had to sit in my bus seat and think. I think what I got out of those bus rides was reflecting, not only on what we did but why we did it.

Going into seventh grade, I had to read The Outsiders by S.E. Hilton for summer reading, and answer questions about the plot, theme, setting and character development before the first day of school. The question on character development was the hardest because it required in-depth thought; it asked me to choose three adjectives to describe Ponyboy and then find supporting examples for why I thought he was the way he was. It asked me to scratch the surface of Ponyboy’s character to allow me to get a deeper understanding of the novel. So, although the “why” question was the hardest, it is always the most important because with it comes understanding.

A friend of mine who graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall had a professor who said students who walk around with iPod headphones in their ears are afraid to hear their own thoughts. Of course, there are times when all of us just want to listen to music, but I think there is some truth to what her professor is saying.

We as a culture are always doing, always on the run, enabled by technology to be superconnected wherever we are in the world. Whenever we are bored, there is always Halo on Playstation 2 or Brickbreaker on Blackberries, Facebook to browse, or SportsCenter or Harry Potter 6 to be watched. Very rarely, though, do we take the time to just think and reflect. It’s like that professor says, video games and TV are a way to check out, to not have to worry about our own thoughts, because often we are afraid to scratch the surface in our own lives, to ask ourselves why we do something or react a certain way in situations. Because the “why” question is hard, it is tempting to avoid it.

It sounds stupid, but for a couple of hours on one bus ride, I thought about how I approach meeting strangers and why I am usually more outgoing with people who don’t know anything about me than with people who have some connection to me. And now when I find myself in a situation where I am meeting new people, I am more comfortable because I know, more or less, how I will react. It’s a kind of self awareness, albeit trivial, that comes with time and thought.

There will always be times when I want to check out and listen to music, and now that I’m back with my phone and computer and Internet and TV, it is hard to detach myself sometimes and take time to listen to my own thoughts. But I try, and I know it is important to do, to stop doing and just think.

Bo Swindell of Greenwich will attend the University of Virginia this fall. A 2008 graduate of Deerfield Academy, he spent the last year traveling, including studying politics in Nepal.