Ian McMillan: I’m slowly learning to take pause for thought

I HAD a mate called Brian who, whenever he was pondering something, would tap his forehead with the pencil he always kept in his top pocket and say in a sonorous voice: “The brain thinks!” He would furrow his brow until it looked like a ploughed field as seen from a light aircraft.

I thought about Brian the other day when I saw somebody on a bench in a park. She was looking up into the blue sky and tapping her feet rhythmically. Her hands were clasped as though in prayer. Suddenly her phone rang and she answered it angrily. “Can you ring back?” she barked. “I’m thinking!”

Two different ways of thinking: tapping your skull with a pencil or tapping your feet and gazing at the heavens. I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking lately; thinking about how we think and, more specifically, how I think. I’m not a pencil-tapper or a sky-gazer. I’m a stroller.

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As I’m writing this, I’m getting up every couple of sentences and wandering around the room. Sometimes I’m pretending that I’m wandering with purpose, going to put the kettle on or checking the answering machine but mostly I just tramp around, from my table to the door, from the door to the window, from the window back to the table. Somehow this perambulation helps me to think; juices flow, grey matter is stimulated, synapses start to dance.

Here in Yorkshire in 2011, I wonder if the nature of our thinking is changing, evolving, altering into something that our grandparents wouldn’t recognise if they could come back and see us.

Our grandparents and parents thought in a certain way; they thought about their jobs and if they worked in manual jobs they thought about how that screw would fit into that flange or how to put that pit- prop in to keep the roof from falling down, and if they worked in white- collar jobs they thought about how to fill in those figures in that ledger and how to word that letter to that supplier.

My dad worked in an office when he left the Navy and he sometimes used to bring work home; he’d sit at the table and rattle away for hours on an adding machine, which was a kind of proto-calculator from the Dark Ages.

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Every so often he’d say in his lilting Scottish accent: “I’ve got a fat heid from thinking hard…” Maybe thought really was slower in those days; maybe it was a power walker rather than a sprinter.

And now it seems that thought is faster, much faster. It’s partly because communication is instant. If I don’t get an answer to an email in two minutes, then I assume the whole of the World Wide Web has broken down and I have to send myself an email to check it’s still working.

The woman on the park bench’s train of thought was derailed by the ringtone of her phone, which wouldn’t have happened years ago, of course, but does that make her a more shallow thinker?

Things are shattering into bite-sized chunks of experience. If I’m not excited and stimulated by a programme on the TV in the first two minutes then I flick the channels to find a better one. My thoughts often seem to be rushing along, but not like crowds at the start of a marathon, bunched together with the other runners but moving of their own accord, but more like clouds in a windy sky, zooming along almost out of control. I have to concentrate on concentrating, and it feels like I’m not really concentrating hard enough.

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And the thing is, this hasn’t always been the case. My mother would sit down with the Yorkshire Post and read the whole paper, cover to cover. It would take ages, especially when she stopped to read bits out to me. I’m talking about a time when my mother was older and had time to read the whole of the Post, but I have memories of watching a young bloke on Cleethorpes beach doing the same thing a few years ago, holding the flapping pages against the biting wind until he’d absorbed the whole lot, every word. And he looked happy.

So I’m going to start a Slow Thinking Campaign. We’ve got the Slow Food Movement, which is against hurried cooking and meal-bolting, and I reckon I could apply the same principle to thinking.

Every day I’ll stop what I’m doing (unless I’m running across a busy road, of course) and take 10 minutes to think slowly. I might try and work out some deep philosophical or political problem. I might do some maths. I might try and translate something into French in my head. Just for those 10 minutes I’ll be a Slow Thinker and I’ll happily end up with a fat heid because I’m thinking so much. And I’ve worked out a secret sign for the Slow Thinker, the equivalent of the Masonic handshake. We’ll tap our foreheads with a pencil and say: “The Brain Thinks...”