Insight and Action

I’ve had a lot of good insights lately. Which is great, if you do something with them. I’ve had a lot of good insights lately, but I haven’t been doing much with them. So I feel like a genius, but when it comes time to make a major decision or solve a problem, I feel like a dunce.

It’s not even overthinking. I’m sure that we’re all familiar with the problem of thinking things to death. We turn over every situation and option and response, but we think so hard that nothing comes through as the best choice. As a result, no choices are made, and we’re stuck in an overwhelming paralysis.

I’ve been through that before, but I’m talking about something different. These insights aren’t the fruits of my own reflection, at least not directly. I’d like to think that they come from outside of myself, if only indirectly through the gut that God gave me.

The insights come, but they need to be cultivated. Whereas overthinking is a sort of cultivation on the products of our own intellect, cultivating insights is something different. The insights come from outside, and the cultivation attempts to pull through the experience in a way that clarifies what has been suggested.

When we don’t do that, the insight becomes a dead letter. (It leads to things like ideas that were supposed to posted on Substack not going up on time — dead letters — for example!) The message has to be received and fleshed out, unlike the process with overthinking. Fleshing it out is the fuel for overthinking, which leads to paralysis. With insight, fleshing it out leads to practical, fruitful action. So perhaps it makes sense that my historical overthinking issue leads me to avoid fleshing out ideas, even when doing so would actually lead to something fruitful, in the case of insight.