Time to think

We all need more time to think, to ponder, to dwell, to sleep on it. It seems to me that so many of us spend our daily lives in the grind of doing, doing, doing, that we never take a moment. Don't have the time or energy to take a step back, reflect upon our course of action, make a thoughtful decision on whether it's the right course, whether we've veered off of our main goals or priorities (or even come up with what our goals are!). Whether we're thinking about the problem in the right way, with the right philosophy, frame, context, and knowledge.

Taking the time to put things together is what sets the truly great aside from the rest of us. To be brilliant, to be profound, you have to do some serious thinking, checking your assumptions, doing thought experiences of what else could be. You have to do some serious doubting of reality, your self, and everything you've been taught.

I've been tossing around this idea in my head for a while now with respect to cancer. Each day I am more impressed with the ingenuity, determination, and hard work that goes into treating women with breast cancer, basic research into development cancer, clinical trials that improve (somewhat) outcomes for people's lives. We still know SO little about cancer, how it metastasizes, and how to actually treat people so cancer doesn't come back EVER.

It seems that all our hard, earnest work is MISSING THE BIG POINT. We are incrementally improving outcomes, but there's a limit. We need a breakthrough, maybe it takes all this work to get a breakthrough, but I'm not sure people have their eyes open wide enough to be able to think of the potential cure. I sure hope so. I wish we had more sit down discussions about our opinions on how cancer works, holistically, compared to specific conversations on one type of mechanism. So much times is spent justifying and pinpointing one protein or improving a subset of 1 type of caner. I wish we could have a thinking retreat and discuss thought experiments about how cancer could be prevented and cured.

As for myself, I am going to try to set aside more time for synthesizing, thinking, reflecting, and experimenting with different concepts in my mind. This will be my attempt to understand the big picture, how the puzzle fits together, and why the puzzle is fitting together a certain way currently.