on the walk

I will open with one word of apology.  If you will look at the calender you will see that after six weeks of almost daily blogging I have had 14 days with only five posts.  I think that the season of continually business and exhaustion represented by that lack is over.  Proof of that should soon be evident.  Now on to my post.

I just spent a wonderful thirty minutes reading from C.S. Lewis’s collection of essay’s “The Weight of Glory.”  I may go back and pull some quote to discuss but for now I will just commend to you this volume.  If you are new to Lewis, then it probably is not the place to start, but if you have read a lot of his fine writing but not yet this little volume, consider this your excuse to stop by a used book store and invest 3 dollars in a collection of delightful essays.

I find that reading Lewis is a wonderful discipline of the mind.  He thinks so well and he invites me to think well along with him.

There are at least two disciplines of thinking well that Lewis embodies.  The first I call the discipline of order.  So much of good thinking involves the ability to put ideas in order.  Well ordered ideas make all the difference.  The second I can juggling.  Some problem are so complex that to think well about them you not only need order but you need to simultaneously hold in your find many different ideas and concepts.  If am not good at this.  If conversation and in life in general I find myself thinking about an idea and moving in an orderly way and growing in momentum and enthusiasm toward a conclusion only to realize that I have forgotten one key concept or essential truth that is also relevant or perhaps even more relevant.

In my own thought I often feel like this requirements of good thought are at odds to each other.  The more that I think in a linear way, the harder it is for me to remain faithful to all the relevant information at once.  Conversely, the more faithfully I attend to all the relevant data,  the more difficult time I have move forward in reasoned thought.
Lewis helps me because his careful reasoned writing excels at both order and juggling.  Certainly there are times that I disagree with his reasoning because I feel that there is information he is ignoring.  (I think to myself, “Of course you can make it sound so simple, anyone can juggle with one ball.”)  But those times are very rare.  More often I find myself inspired to re-tackle the questions that face my life, with the renewed discipline and clarity.

So now inspired by his examples I have a few things to think about.

on the walk

-Ethan

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