The Importance of Thinking Aloud

When I was a teenager, I started to participate in discussion groups where we wrote and presented essays on various topics. I could not have anticipated the impact this exercise would have on my intellectual development. Having the opportunity to sit down and put words on paper (or screen to be more precise) forced me to think more slowly and coherently. Because we would then read our essays aloud, I also had the strange experience of frequently hearing my own thoughts reflected back to me.

More than once, especially in the beginning,¹ I found myself disagreeing with my own ideas as they were leaving my mouth (not all of them, but still). Sometimes pride got the better of me, and I ended up playing the devil’s advocate during the discussion, defending claims I no longer fully believed, simply because I had written them.

I learnt a couple of things. One, that you can sometimes be of two (or even more) minds, particularly when you have the time and space to sit with uncertainty. Learning to live with ambiguity is a valuable skill,² not because everything is equally valid, but because holding a question open for a moment longer often reveals what you would otherwise miss. Two, that being wrong is not necessarily a bad thing. Some discussions are about more than just being right; they can be sites where you (un)learn valuable stuff about yourself (and/through others). And three, that the simple act of putting thoughts into form, however provisional, can reveal the tacit assumptions shaping how you see the world, giving you just enough distance to reconsider them (even if you end up reafirming them) in light of what others (or other parts of yourself) may bring to the table.

Maybe this is why I keep coming back to the idea of having a blog, even though so far I’ve never managed to be consistent with it. I spent years in these groups and now I’m out. I seem to miss a space where I can test how my own intellectual positions shift (beyond my job).