Circular Thinking

In my own paltry and unqualified assessment, I find myself what I call a compulsive thinker. I am not a doctor and I've never seen a therapist, so take my little self-diagnosis with a heavy grain of salt. All I mean by "compulsive thinker" is that my mind is always contemplating something. As a young man I believed this was a shrewd, prudent trait; a thing that meant I was destined to be wise beyond my years in just a few short trips around the sun. However, as always my best laid plans turned out nothing like I expected. This was no different, which is an irony all its own since I had spent years thinking about how I would turn out as an adult.

Whenever I am faced with situations, problems, and quandaries in life, I tend to analyze the situation from every angle that I can perceive myself, and I'm always trying to find a new angle in which I can either justify the outcome I'm looking for or find a better one. If I could have recorded my musings on these topics of my thoughts I would have a library of those small voice-recorder cassette tapes rivaling the size of the Library of Congress. They would all be organized by topic and phase of life in which it was recorded, and easily accessible by some mass card-catalog system. It would be useful in the same manner than a journal would be useful; in that a journal is of little use after it's on the paper outside of the occasional reminiscing session.

I was reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden this past weekend and ran upon this quote:

The past few weeks I have found myself in a particularly enduring train of thought, one that starts from some undeniable truths about myself that I've come to realize. None of the available realistic outcomes of this problem are tenable to me, and the outcomes in which I think I would be happy seem to be impossible to attain for various reasons. The thought starts at a particular point, some truth or fact about the situation, and I progress through it line by line and detail by detail, until I finally arrive back at the point from which I started, and the cycle begins again. It's like running on a track for days on end. You would become intimately familiar with the little quarter mile route. You'd know where each crack in the asphalt is, probably even little rocks and some gravel pieces, weeds, and a sun bleached candy wrapper fluttering in the grass a few feet from the pavement. I am now incredibly well acquainted with all of the little intricacies of my dilemma, or at least the ones that I can perceive. In the book from which the quote is taken, the thought about which it is speaking turns out to be the correct conclusion, as dreaded as it was. My situation is a little different though. I'm not pondering an already written yet unrevealed mystery, I'm pondering something which has not been set in stone yet.

When I first put down the bones for this little essay about self, I had just come across the above quote in chapter seven of the fifty five chapter novel. The quote stuck in my head because I related to it, so I wanted to make sure I didn't lose the thought before I could put it to paper. In the following forty eight chapters of the book, I encountered an incredibly simple perspective, one so amazingly obvious that only someone like myself could possibly miss it. Steinbeck explores a particular passage of scripture in this novel; while I don't necessarily wholly agree with the conclusion on the passage presented by the book in its historical application, I do believe it is a very good devotional application of the passage to the lives of men. The particular verse is Genesis 4:7:

For those who are unfamiliar, the context of the verse is such: Cain was a tiller of the ground while Abel was a shepherd. When they offered a sacrifice to the Lord, Abel offered a burnt offering of a lamb while Cain offered "of the fruit of the ground". The Lord accepted Abel's sacrifice but not Cain's, so Cain is angered and this verse is the Lord's reply to his anger. It is commonly accepted that the "his" and "him" in the second half of the verse is referring to the sin from the first sentence, and the particular part that is discussed is thou shalt. The book posits that the Hebrew word here is timshel, and the conclusion they come to is that it doesn't mean thou shalt as a commandment or prophecy, it means thou mayest. In the context of the book, it is used to show men that they are not on some kind of set path because of who they perceive themselves to be; whether they overcome the sin and bad traits they perceive to be within themselves is entirely up to them alone. It's a lesson in self-forgiveness.

So how does this apply to my situation? I've been running around this track of thought for a few weeks now. I don't think the application of the book's conclusion really helps me arrive to any particular point on the track that's new; I don't believe it helps me find a new outcome that I can achieve which I haven't already attempted in my mind. However, what it does do is remind me that it's entirely within myself to just leave the track. I've been thinking about it not stop for weeks and because of that, it seems like so much bigger of a problem than it actually is. I've gotten so used to running on this little track that I hasn't dawned on me to go somewhere else and find different tracks that are easier to solve. Easier said than done? Maybe, but if you want to actually break out of the self-built bars you place upon your mind, thou mayest.

So incredibly simple that only someone like me could miss it.