"The unexamined life is..." Oh, never mind.
Because
I do not think
Because I know
I will not know...
(Eliot/Ash Wednesday)
I'm not thinking anymore.
Sad but true. A mere month, if that, into 'gradual school' (I once heard someone, completely unintentionally, utter that perfect Freudian slip when referring to graduate school) and I'm already losing the capacity for disciplined thought. I'm learning a lot about cognition, but I'm sure not doing much real cogitating.
I cite many reasons for my mental demise. First is the corrupting influence of my narrow goal structure (sadly, I'm automatically envisioning this all in terms of brain structures. I wish I could stop doing that). Anyways, the idea is that I'm focusing more on quantity than quality--try to get as much of the reading done as I can, without always thinking too well about what I'm reading. Or in terms of research--get a project up and running, get the logistics of it down, theory and whatnot comes later. And so on. In essence my pragmatism is trumping my more contemplative side.
But there's also the fact that very quickly my head is just getting too full, and is pulled in too many different directions. Only part of that is attributable to the mass of content that I'm learning. There's also the novelty of the new situation I'm in, as well as the need to be constantly planning my time, trying to figure out how to balance various demands.
And in general, I'm tired, and a little spazzed, which doesn't help much either.
Not that these are necessarily unfamiliar states for me but they've been worse than usual lately.
I do not like this. I want to think again.
My working memory is so poor these days that sometimes I'll begin a long sentence, and by the time I've reached the second or third clause, I can't remember what I was saying during the first part. Sometimes I just end up talking in a bunch of sentence fragments with added on redundancies to cover up for anything that I may have said earlier, but I'm not sure that I have, so I might as well say them again. Has this happened to anyone else?
I guess it's all a matter of adjusting my priorities, determining what's important. We'll see what happens.