On Introspection

Birth of Introspection 

As a kid, I would lie in bed and think about thinking. How is it that I am here, thinking? I pondered my own sense of wonder. I wondered what it meant to ponder.

As a college student, I learned psychologists have a word for this – metacognition. Thinking about your own mental processes.

We all do it in varying degrees depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in: as imperceptible as our own breathing when we are engrossed in the mundane; as all-encompassing as the night sky when we are in awe of the stars overhead.

Erosion of Introspection

My introspective journey began as that kid, lying in bed and contemplating self-awareness. There was a groundedness I felt back then that was slowly eaten away, as life pulled my focus away from inner reflection to external success.

The erosion of introspection, for me, started early. During an elementary science lesson, my teacher once asked “What is the fastest thing you can imagine?” “Sight,” I replied after a reflective pause. The teacher told me that I was incorrect. Then, he went on to teach us about velocity. I blindly accepted that I was wrong and I studied hard.

During another lesson about even and odd numbers, I learned that 3 is not divisible by 2. “But it is!” I thought to myself. 3 divided by 2 is simply one and a half. What am I missing? Again, I was corrected and I continued to study hard.

In both cases, I abandoned my intuition. My reflections had led me astray, I lamented. Only later, in advanced classes, did I learn that light was indeed the fastest thing in this universe and that the categorization of numbers as even or odd was purely semantic. My reflections had not led me astray. But I had been taught to ignore them.

Crowding out of Introspection

As I moved through college, medical, and residency training, my mind continued to fill with technical knowledge. Reflection and introspection were crowded out. New goals were now the focus of my pursuits – money, success, notoriety. That is, until I burned out.

Introspective blindness

I believe burnout, at its core, is introspective blindness. We all come to this world well-equipped for cognition and discovery. But many of us allow meaningless pursuits, educational indoctrination, and poor life decisions to strip us of the most precious item in our cognitive inventory – the contemplation of self. Just as we allow circumstance to rob us of this unique ability, only we, ourselves, can reclaim it from the busy world around us. 

The waterfall

I like to learn and explain by analogy. As a lover of poetry, I understand introspection by borrowing imagery from Vaughan’s beautiful poem, ‘The Waterfall.’ 

Without introspection, we are a leaf, adrift on a fast-moving stream. Life passes us by. With introspection, we fall, as if over a waterfall, inward, within ourselves, into a deep and tranquil sea.

Thinking about how you think is the most important thing you can do in life because self-realization is not possible without it. Thus, introspection, if performed deeply, honestly, and regularly, frees you from the superficial encumbrances of life.

-Eddie