Overthinking

"We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It's a death trap." — Anthony Hopkins

There is a world of difference between thinking about information, and actually embodying it.

We live in a world of thought, where everything must be categorized, labeled, identified and placed into its tidy box. We become so enamored with these thoughts that we place them above reality, above actual experience. It removes us from the world and from having to actually observe. It's like looking at the world thorugh a camera lens, constantly trying to capture and analyze the scene, rather than actually being present and participating.

When it comes to learning, this leads to a particular trap: asking questions to gather more information, rather than to reach a deeper understanding. Thought leading to more thought, rather than experience leading to deeper feeling.

When I was learning from my teacher, I regularly wanted to stop and ask her questions about everything she had said, or repeat it back to her as I was doing it. I told myself this helped me to understand, but she would become frustrated with me.

"In asking me these questions you are missing the moment!" she would say.

She was right. I was talking about thoughts, and thinking about them, rather than feeling and acting. By the time she had told me to do something, the thoughts I had about it removed me 5-10 strides from the actual moment. This isn't to say that questions aren't important, but that mine had become a diversion from actually immersing myself in the riding. Every time I stepped outside the experience to think about what I was doing, I lost the moment. I was perpetually behind or above the horse's movement, trying to catch up to something that had happened long before I began analyzing it.

As she became hard of hearing, I bought her a two way radio for us to use for her to coach me with. One day my piece didn't work, and I couldn't speak back to her. For the entire day (I would take lessons on every horse in the barn, so six to eight lessons in a row) I could not speak. At first I was frustrated, and my mind went to tying itself in knots, trying to remember all the thoughts I had so I could express them later. Eventually, it overworked itself into defeat, and gave up. It was finally quiet, and suddenly, four lessons in, I found myself at a still point: not thinking anything, but just listening, flowing as if I could hear what my teacher was going to tell me to do before she even said it. There was a new and invisible connection between her mind and mine flowing directly into the horse. It was the best riding I had ever done.

I have carried that experience with me ever since, and found it again and again with her weekly, as I developed the discipline of feeling rather than thinking. I've come to realize that thinking about riding can sometimes be like a dog trying to bite its own tail. We circle around the same ideas, endlessly trying to understand something that can only be truly understood through immersive experience.

Theory has its place. It gives us language, context, and a framework through which we can begin to understand what we are seeing and feeling. But there comes a point where language fails us, and thought interrupts us. This desire to categorize and think about everything can be in fact the very thing holding us back.