I chose to complete the daunting task of organizing my black hole of a closet. The thing practically unhinges its snake-like jaws every time I feed it with random objects, clothes, shoes. Usually I'm not an excessively organized person; that is until my situation-onset OCD kicks in and my straightening up turns into an alphabetized game of Tetris. Some things needed to be dumped, some moved, folded, tilted, turned. I didn't want to do it, but once I started I knew I wouldn't be able to stop.
Before I started I knew my goal and how I wanted to accomplish it. I knew what should go where and with what and how. But I didn't really know specifics. I didn't know that my jeans were going to be folded in two piles, or that my old piggy bank would be parallel with a snow globe.
During the process I felt anxious. I saw the progress like taming my hair by brushing and untangling its endless knots. Creating piles of right out garbage and useless parts of nameless objects was relieving. I don't quite know how to articulate it, but it made me feel current and in the moment, seeing that all that was really left were things that I had a good chance of using or appreciating in the future, and the past was cleaning itself up.
Even after my closet was dustless and organized like a well-ordered machine, I felt that I couldn't stop. I then proceeded to clean and straighten the rest of my room until every object was neatly tucked away in its home. Even my "crap drawer" looked a bit less crappy and more purposeful. After I finished, I felt satisfaction and serenity. Organizing my humble abode definitely made my mind feel more at ease, for my thoughts had less objects and junk to jump around and think about.
This project made me realize that the way I create ideas inside my head parallels the environment around me, Like my room, my thinking process does not organize itself. If left alone they will tangle into a taxing pile of "I'll-do-it-later"s and "it-will-happen-eventually"s. Unless I truly focus and put my mind to it, things will never be worked out. My endless divergent thought will never converge unless I choose to take the time to steer it in that direction. I would like to work on creating an organized mind that allows me to be messy up until the point where it becomes noticeably overwhelming and I need to clean it. Like my room, its okay to throw things on the floor or push things under the bed, but eventually I need to embrace that I live there, and straightening up is inescapable and necessary.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
Metacognition: Early Modern Era Project
I've never really been one to think about my thinking. But when you take the time to think about the way you think, and realize it's actually a little different than the way you thought you thought, you learn a lot about yourself.
I went through an interesting period of personal discovery when working on the most recent history project regarding a "TFAD" for a society from the Early Modern Era. It seems simple, right? Take what you read from the book, swallow it, spit it out in your own words, meet the required guidelines, and you're set. I mean, it doesn't seem like I would be exhausting my brain power. However, group projects are so much more than focusing on your part and having it all miraculously come together in the end. It was in my nature to kind of take the upper hand and make sure that everyone was getting their work done, was having their questions answered, and were set on track to finish with a smooth landing. However, I found myself not only thinking about my own work, but also about others, and this added to my mental load. What I'm trying to get at is that I have observed through my lengthy almost 16 years of life that I tend to be someone who helps others with their thinking, as well as trying to balance and organize my own. When it comes to group projects, I would like to think that others appreciate this, but I know I also need to find a happy medium between my runway train of thoughts and other's temporarily stuck ones.
As a thinker I would like to become more organized. Ironically I am very obsessive compulsive about organization in my physical world, but the thoughts the ricochet around my head seem to be very sporadic and divergent. While although this may be beneficial for brainstorming and also be very advantageous for coming up with new ideas, this can be also often problematic. Sometimes I will be trying to get out all of the ideas in my head, and I ignore the time needed to be spent on further deepening specific, key thoughts. I really need to slow down and take the time to form a complete, well-thought-out thought before trying to formulate a million other partially-developed thoughts that ultimately become irrelevant to the larger picture.
Sometimes it's this over thinking things that becomes my biggest enemy. Much too often I think the life out of a thought, and this makes me very stressed and even paranoid. It is also these feelings that lead to overwhelming anxiety, and this I have found to be very debilitating.
What surprises me about my thinking is how influenced I am by others thoughts. Sometimes some of my best ideas emerge after someone else's own unique thoughts create very pronounced ones for myself. Of course, I'm not saying that I take their ideas and use it as my own. Rather, by talking with others, the budding seedlings of my own euphorically metaphorical thoughts are sprinkled with water and bathed in sunshine, and then bloom into something I would never have come up with on my own. This peer-building thought process is one of the reasons, I believe, that I made the right choice in 8th grade to try out for Academy.
Something I like about my thinking is my curiosity to know why things are a certain way or how things are done. Especially with this very prevalent election, I have recently found myself getting in never-ending conversations prolonged by my profuse amount of questions with my parents in the car. Random questions come to me while listening to the news, like "What is the point of the electoral college over the majority of the vote?" or "Why are there vice-presidential debates?" or "Are the church and state really separated?" These ideas seem to come to me unexpectedly, yet they open up a whole novel of knowledge and conversations that would have otherwise been undiscovered.
Overall, most thoughts are uncontrollable. No one can really pick and choose what pops into their heads unannounced But what we can control is what we want to think more about, and what we want to spend our time developing. This is something no one is perfect at. No one can think about a single idea and suddenly know all there is to know about it. But believe it or not, being an efficient thinker takes practice, and when it comes to essays or homework or speeches or projects, this can be very beneficial. But sometimes I enjoy being a bit mindless, a bit aloof, or a bit unreasonable, and that's okay too.
I went through an interesting period of personal discovery when working on the most recent history project regarding a "TFAD" for a society from the Early Modern Era. It seems simple, right? Take what you read from the book, swallow it, spit it out in your own words, meet the required guidelines, and you're set. I mean, it doesn't seem like I would be exhausting my brain power. However, group projects are so much more than focusing on your part and having it all miraculously come together in the end. It was in my nature to kind of take the upper hand and make sure that everyone was getting their work done, was having their questions answered, and were set on track to finish with a smooth landing. However, I found myself not only thinking about my own work, but also about others, and this added to my mental load. What I'm trying to get at is that I have observed through my lengthy almost 16 years of life that I tend to be someone who helps others with their thinking, as well as trying to balance and organize my own. When it comes to group projects, I would like to think that others appreciate this, but I know I also need to find a happy medium between my runway train of thoughts and other's temporarily stuck ones.
As a thinker I would like to become more organized. Ironically I am very obsessive compulsive about organization in my physical world, but the thoughts the ricochet around my head seem to be very sporadic and divergent. While although this may be beneficial for brainstorming and also be very advantageous for coming up with new ideas, this can be also often problematic. Sometimes I will be trying to get out all of the ideas in my head, and I ignore the time needed to be spent on further deepening specific, key thoughts. I really need to slow down and take the time to form a complete, well-thought-out thought before trying to formulate a million other partially-developed thoughts that ultimately become irrelevant to the larger picture.
Sometimes it's this over thinking things that becomes my biggest enemy. Much too often I think the life out of a thought, and this makes me very stressed and even paranoid. It is also these feelings that lead to overwhelming anxiety, and this I have found to be very debilitating.
What surprises me about my thinking is how influenced I am by others thoughts. Sometimes some of my best ideas emerge after someone else's own unique thoughts create very pronounced ones for myself. Of course, I'm not saying that I take their ideas and use it as my own. Rather, by talking with others, the budding seedlings of my own euphorically metaphorical thoughts are sprinkled with water and bathed in sunshine, and then bloom into something I would never have come up with on my own. This peer-building thought process is one of the reasons, I believe, that I made the right choice in 8th grade to try out for Academy.
Something I like about my thinking is my curiosity to know why things are a certain way or how things are done. Especially with this very prevalent election, I have recently found myself getting in never-ending conversations prolonged by my profuse amount of questions with my parents in the car. Random questions come to me while listening to the news, like "What is the point of the electoral college over the majority of the vote?" or "Why are there vice-presidential debates?" or "Are the church and state really separated?" These ideas seem to come to me unexpectedly, yet they open up a whole novel of knowledge and conversations that would have otherwise been undiscovered.
Overall, most thoughts are uncontrollable. No one can really pick and choose what pops into their heads unannounced But what we can control is what we want to think more about, and what we want to spend our time developing. This is something no one is perfect at. No one can think about a single idea and suddenly know all there is to know about it. But believe it or not, being an efficient thinker takes practice, and when it comes to essays or homework or speeches or projects, this can be very beneficial. But sometimes I enjoy being a bit mindless, a bit aloof, or a bit unreasonable, and that's okay too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)