thinging

Recalling some words from Kichu Krishnan (one workshop I’d done around 1998)…

The minute we come across a new idea, or a circumstance, or a person… anyThing… what typically happens is we try and match this Thing with all the concepts we has accumulated over time.

We have certain ready-made boxes in our minds… categorisations where we feel that “this is how this thing is”.

Our tendency to react to anything that we come across is match it with what we already know, and then asap put it into one of the known categories! “AH I know what this Thing is ALL ABOUT!”

He called this as “THINGING”. So the minute we have THINGED anything, that’s the end of it for us 🙂 We become more or less immune to anything more we hear about it.

This THINGING process is negligible for children, but becomes more and more stronger as we grow more and more into over-opinionated adults

I’ve come across quite a few really intelligent people having THINGED many beautiful ideas away. In these days we’re being bombarded by information from every quarter – we have so many categories already – I wonder how many things I’ve been missing…

If I meet Kichu again, I’d tell him that over the years I’ve also found that Thinging is useful to a certain extent as well …but agreed that no doubt we sort of overdo it… 🙂

Hmm… actually I think reduction in Thinging turns out to be the same as refining listening…