Thinking...

Do you know the feeling when you feel something is "after" you? For instance, a book?

That happened to me: I kept on seeing this book. Its white cover, very simple design appealed to me. Its thickeness did not appeal to me. But after seeing it about, what, four times in different cities in the world, I decided to take it.

I am sure its long writing will make my process to read it pretty slow, but I am starting to get benefit from it. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman is more than a book, it is a manual for living. Click here for a review which looks like a small summary.

It contains many points and ideas that explained to me several things, and I am in the first chapters. But, beyond that, there is this person who wrote (or co-wrote) this whole magnificient book on how humans think.

2002 was a great year for him, as he got a Nobel Prize in Economics, even so he himself is a psychologist... After purchasing it and reading it is that I realised one of the big reasons for me to admire, appreciate or study and research someone else's book was there: he overcame a limit.

If you read The Economist, you will realise the economists are a different kind within the human species - even though it is a magazine, they call it a newspaper... Well, the same applies for ITC engineers or taxi-drivers, I know, but I just wondered how is it that a person with an inclination for the subtle aspects of mind could be attracted to numbers, so much, that they gave him a Nobel Prize.

Kahneman, whom I don't have the pleasure to haver personally met, is one of those rare people who are able to use both capacities, the intuition and logic, the human view and the stadistical approach.

Most of people are used to live in just one half of his or her potential, spending their lives by thinking the world is a rose garden or a bunch of numbers. It is wonderful to see someone who sees the world as a rose garden AND a bunch of numbers, depending on the moment, integrating both possibilities.

That is the depth of thinking, when you are able to not be restrained, not even by your own tendencies, so that you can see beyond the present horizons. Because it is only then that you can really understand and assimilate a situation fully. How to do it?

For Kahneman, his story is told in the link I've shared before. For myself, whom I like to think I am a balanced guy even though I am still in the process, it was meditation and a spiritual life that enabled me to see the rose garden without leaving the bunch of numbers behind.

What about you?