This past week has been a week of learning. Indeed, it is a fact of life that even the simplest things in life can be uninentionally and “innocently” twisted into something more complicated than deciphering a “how to do origami” book.
Take finals, for example. I have spent many-a sleepless night worrying about my vocal “jury” — a terrible name for it, I admit, but they couldn’t very well call it a vocal “puppies and bubbles,”– only to realize that it really wasn’t that hard, I just had to stop thinking so much and get some sleep.
My band teacher gave us this same advice in band, “Just stop thinking,” and in fact, the songs seemed to work out a lot better when we stopped thinking so hard and just played our instruments. Many problems are apt to occur when too much thinking is applied to simple things when regular old programming could do it much better. Like with this picture. It could have been inspired by someone thinking much too deeply about the possible uses for this so-called “hat.” Waxing philosophical (or paranoid), if you will.
The thought processes may have gone much like this…
“Oh look, a hat! What a nice hat. Is it really a hat? What if it actually turns out to be something entirely different? But it really is quite nice. I rather like it. I think I want to put it on my head. But what if the hat doesn’t like my head? Does it really WANT to go on my head? What if it doesn’t fit? What if it’s too small and hurts my head? That would make me very sad. But what if it’s too big and makes me look ridiculous? That would make me very sad too. What if someone else wants it? How do I know I didn’t buy the hat someone else wanted? I wouldn’t want to do that. What if the hat just wants to be worn somewhere else? Or just wants to be entirely decorational and just enjoy being on my hat rack? Maybe it wants to explore other options?”
And so on and so on. Of course, it would have been much easier just to put the hat on. Eventually, many of those questions may have been answered, but many of them may remain unanswered. Pretty much because hats can’t talk, which is a pity. We may learn much from the unthinking hat.
Of course, many problems can also occur when our God-given cerebral cortexes are not put to good use. I’m sure many-a problem has occured because all decisions were left to the less-intelligent back-end of the brain. Such examples may be the classic “oh crap the stick is blue” after-moment, or the afternoon at the hospital extracting a cocoa puff from your nose, or the infamous last words, “hey guys, watch this!” All moments that one would wish to take back, but of course, no amount of cerebral cortex has those capabilities. And then you just look silly with a hat on your rear.
It is times like these when we may have wished it was only a hat.
