Thinking Too Much

“What do you know for sure?” Ernie Colvin asked me the same question his Tennessee drawl every time I visited. 

“Not much,” was my usual answer.

The implied humility in my answer was a pretense because I thought I knew a lot as most young men do. Now though, as I reflect on our friendship nearly a half-century later, I believe I would answer the same way, but with seriousness. I have learned much since I knew Ernie, but that knowledge has only helped me realize how ignorant I am. As I used to tell my students: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Most looked at me with puzzlement when I said that, but others got it. The truly educated understand that the best we can come up with after a lifetime of learning and reflecting is a very tentative framework of understanding about the world around us. I like to call it a working hypothesis that should be subject to modification at regular intervals.

Ernie was a veteran of two wars: the Spanish Civil War and World War II, during which he had been a prisoner of war in Germany. He would be sitting at his desk carving wood and looking up with a wry grin when I came by. He was a security guard on the night shift and I was a field supervisor for the company. It was 1970 and I was nineteen, though I pretended to be 21 so I could get a pistol permit which was required for the job. Ernie was in his sixties and he was patient enough to offer thoughtful answers to my many questions. He taught me a great deal during our frequent, late-night conversations.

One of the faults that has dogged me for a lifetime is overuse of my brain and underuse of my heart. Since I became conscious of it, I’ve been trying to bring myself into balance but it’s slow going. Observing my youngest grandchildren helps in this endeavor because they’re full of wonder as they explore the world around them. They seem to feel it more than think about it and I remember being that way too until I got out of balance. My brain was always the favored utensil in my personal toolbox and I used it almost exclusively until realizing there were other tools in there as well.

Somewhere around eight or nine, I remember laying in bed after lights out and pondering the universe — the big one, that is, especially its outer limits. Trying to image our expanding universe fifteen billion years after the Big Bang, I’d imagine space — the nothingness between material things flying out from the central point of the original explosion. How far would things travel into nothingness? Was there a limit to the great nothing into which those things were hurtling in every direction? I knew intuitively there wasn’t. I knew that it was limitless, infinite. I knew also that, though the universe didn’t have limits, my human brain did. It couldn’t fully comprehend infinity. All I could know was that the eternal existed. That realization was extremely frustrating until I accepted it.

Accepting it became the initial basis for my belief in the Creator, but it wasn’t an “Aha!” moment. The process was gradual. Call it intelligent design or ultimate creativeness, but I began realizing that something conceived of the universe and caused it to be — with me in it. Accepting that the Eternal had a capital E helped me relax as well. Let me re-emphasize that the process has been gradual and ongoing. I’m still in it and somewhere along the way I came to believe.

Also along the way came a quote from that brilliant atheist-turned-Christian, Augustine of Hippo. Even though he wrote it fifteen centuries ago, it jumped right off the page at me: “If thou hast not understood, said I, believe. For understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.”

So now there is something else I know for sure. I don’t feel any compulsion to make others know it. It’s enough that I do. I’m not an evangelist and neither was Ernie Colvin. He never preached; he just was. I sensed something in him that I wanted even though I didn’t know what it was.

Learning and Discerning

Too much information is coming my way and there isn’t time to digest it all. It’s causing me stress and I’m trying to do something about it.

It’s the internet. So much of my work - and yes, I’m still working even though I’m retired from teaching - involves a computer on my lap. I do banking for myself and a client. I write. I exchange emails with friends, family and business associates. I store images. The laptop is one of my portals on the world, past and present. I cannot remember the last time I wanted to know something and couldn’t find out about it on the internet.

Last night, for example, I looked up the life span of Ignatius of Loyola after discussing the Society of Jesus with a friend. Ignatius was born in 1491 - just before Columbus discovered America - just before Muslims were driven from the Iberian Peninsula back to Africa after centuries of domination. As Ignatius grew to manhood, his country became the richest, most powerful on earth by taking in gold and silver from the New World. The Protestant Reformation rocked Europe. Ignatius founded the Jesuits and led the Counterreformation. Thoroughly engaged in the far-reaching ideas and events of his time, Ignatius died in 1556 at 65. He had been overwhelmed by world events as a young man and then chose to step back drastically to digest it all and seek direction. Then, all through the rest of his busy and productive life, he retreated periodically to process.A client's dock on Kezar Lake, Lovell

Not being bound to a classroom anymore gives me more time to absorb information, but not enough. I’ve subscribed to news feeds from many interesting and trusted sources but I still can’t read them all. I scroll down my email list and think: “I’ll read that one later and that one too,” but the lists still get longer. My server warns me that my inbox memory is reaching its limit and I must delete still-unread news feeds. It pains me to watch as information I can’t absorb vaporizes back into cyberspace. Reading a book is different. It’s all there in my hands and I can see where the end is. A good author fashions the information with a beginning, a middle, and an end and that can be comforting.

Ignatius went to live in a cave and pray all day to make sense of his world. While I’ve been visiting regional caves with my wife lately studying archaeology and geology, I don’t want to live in one. What I’m learning to do however, is tear myself away from my laptop periodically and go outside. I’ll drive around Kezar Lake and look over the properties I’m responsible for. Smelling fresh air and feeling a cool wind helps clear my head as I watch what light and wind do to the water’s surface. I’ll stroll around nearby archaeological sites and see what may have been turned up by wind and rain. Most days I can pick up a piece of stone discarded by an unknown someone centuries or even millennia before - and that can put the hyperactive 21st century into perspective for a while.

There’s a limit to what I can know and understand. I’ve been pressing against that ceiling lately and discovering I must be discerning about what I feed into the mill wheel between my ears. I have to be careful about what sort of grist my mind should grind, and how much. I have to glean the important and chuck the rest. Walking around outside helps that process.Kezar Lake, looking northwest

At such times I’m reminded of people I learned about when moving to Lovell thirty-four years ago. There were about a half-dozen women who wouldn’t come out of their houses for months at a time and then only briefly when nobody was looking. I pondered why there should be so many afflicted with what seemed to be agoraphobia in a small town of fewer than eight hundred souls. Was it because they’d grown up during the early twentieth century and couldn’t absorb the changes going on around them? Life in Lovell before electricity, paved roads, or automobiles was essentially a nineteenth-century existence. Then, all of a sudden there were radios, televisions, cars, planes, telephones all around bringing noise and information galore. Did all that overwhelm them and cause them to retreat into their more-controlled domestic environment where they would get news only when someone stopped by for a chat? It would be easier to process information that way. It could be measured out in digestible chunks and discussed with a familiar human being.Mount Washington from Christian Hill in Lovell

Lately, I’m trying to do that too. I’m arranging to spend time with others who have common interests, one at a time, and process things. So far, it’s helping.