234. How to Have a Thought

<p>Maya Angelou was right, “People will forget what you said...but people will never forget how you made them feel.”</p> <p>Because I don’t remember what this woman said to me, but I do remember how I felt: Attacked.</p> <p>My heart was racing. I had two options: Lash out and defend my position, or excuse myself from the conversation.</p> <p>My brain hastily searched for the best way out: Slip into the kitchen to get another drink? Go to the bathroom? Awkwardly appeal to my need to mingle?</p> <p>But then I realized something: I felt attacked, but she wasn’t attacking me. She wasn’t even disagreeing with me. She had merely asked a question.</p> <h3>Don’t be other people. Be a thinking person.</h3> <p>Only now, years later, do I understand why I felt so threatened. I had met a thinking person.</p> <p>Oscar Wilde said it well,</p> <blockquote> <p>Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. -Oscar Wilde</p> </blockquote> <p>Forgive the quotation, but it accurately describes who I was. I was someone else. Whatever I had said to that woman at that cocktail party, it wasn’t a thought. It was someone else’s opinion.</p> <p>And I was encountering someone who was not someone else. She was herself. She was someone who didn’t speak in pre-programmed sound bites. Someone who didn’t merely parrot the latest news headline or social media meme. Someone who listened to what you said, asked questions about it, and expected a response. Someone who, in good faith, assumed I, too, was a thinking person.</p> <hr /> <p>Since that day, I have endeavored to become a thinking person. I’ll never truly master thinking. If I thought I could master thinking, that wouldn’t be very thinking-person-like of me.</p> <p>But once in awhile, I do have a genuine thought. Some people agree with me. Because I’ve tried to become a thinking person, I was proud when an Amazon reviewer of my latest book called me “a very original thinker,” and when best-selling author Jeff Go