In ‘Untamed’, Glennon Doyle writes about how her daughter was impressed by the fact that she gets all of her ideas in the shower. She thought that the shower space was somehow miraculous or that the ideation had something to do with water.
But Glennon had a theory that the time in the shower was the only time when she was unplugged from the outside and alone with her own thoughts. Rather than being bombarded by the inputs, she was free to think for herself. That is, as Glennon argued, what people were doing before Google.
“Time in the shower is like googling your own mind,” she said.
That is a fascinating concept: googling our own minds. We are using ‘googling’- a relatively new concept, to explain thinking- a considerably older concept. The irony, of course, is that nowadays most of us do a lot more googling than thinking.
Whenever we’re trying to figure something out, our first reaction is to turn to Google: for directions, restaurant recommendations, book suggestions, you name it. Google has become an official source of truth. When arguing about a piece of trivia with a friend, you’ll be googling the answer to your question to prove him wrong.
With Google, we don’t need to waste our time on rambling, thinking, and being confused. Google is great. It has a lot of good, useful, and accurate information that makes our lives easier.
However, in addition to obsessive Googling, another hallmark of our time is information overload. We’re drowning in information while being thirsty for wisdom. Google does contain information but it can’t transform it into wisdom. That’s what we have to do with our own minds. Wasn’t the signature of 2020 the major confusion despite a ton of information and mountains of data? Somehow being unable to make sense of it all and figure out what to do next, we all ended up puzzled and confused, individually and collectively.
And that’s where Googling our own minds comes in. The lost habit of thinking, diving in, spending time immersed into our own thoughts, secluding ourselves from the world, sifting through the information, processing it, understanding it, discarding some, and getting a much-needed perspective.
In Playing Big, Tara Mohr lists the tendency to prepare, overprepare, and do endless research as one of the bad habits of good students that prevent us from playing big. We were all trained to think that answers are out there, that if we read more literature, gather more data and information from credible sources, we’ll be able to come up with better ideas. But often what we need more of is shower time, quiet time, googling our own minds for insights and ideas.
“An overarching message reinforced again and again is [that] the value we have to contribute on a topic comes from information absorbed from an external source from the teacher’s lecture, from the homework reading, from research. Understandably, years of that conditioning leave many [adult women] looking for the next degree or book or a few hours of research to give them the answers they need whatever the task is before them. Yet, playing big often requires the opposite: accessing what we already know, trusting its value in bringing it forth.”
That does not mean that the data, research and information are not useful. But, as we’re already obsessing overconsuming information, we should restore the balance by giving ourselves time to think.
The roller-coaster of 2020 gave many of us space and time for silence, thinking, and googling our own minds.
Have we done it? Have we created pockets of quietness in stillness, writing, thinking? Or have we filled all the possible gaps with news, social media, Netflix, in other sources of buzz?
Who are we when we are not consuming (information and products)?
What do we really want when we are not told what we should want?
Who are we when we stop trying to become who we should be?
What do we really think when we’re not told what we should be thinking?
How are we really feeling when we are not trying to make our lives appear Instagram-worthy?
These are big and messy questions you can only attempt to answer by googling your own mind. Answers from Google will indeed make your life a bit more convenient, but googling your own mind will help you create a life worth living.
I thought that in this intense week when we’re all refreshing our newsfeeds 100x per hour, we could use a gentle reminder to turn to our own search engines for some additional insight and wisdom.
Before you go…
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