Don't Mind Me - I'm Just Talking to Myself

This morning I had arranged to meet with one of my professors to talk to him about the progress I've made on a project this last week. I was a little nervous about doing this - I had had some good thoughts about where I wanted to go with this project, but having good thoughts is different from talking about them to someone else. I was worried that as soon as I opened my mouth, my ideas would suddenly become either incoherent or trivial, or both.

So to prepare myself I sat down in a place where no one could hear me and started talking through my ideas. To myself. I guess I sort of considered it practice for talking through the ideas with my professor present, and it worked. As I thought aloud, things started to come together in a way they hadn't when I had confined my ideas to writing, and an hour later when I presented my thoughts more formally to my professor, I found that I was able to talk to him about what I was thinking much more easily and clearly than I would have had I not "practiced" ahead of time.

This isn't the first time I have talked to myself. I do it all the time, in fact. When I am trying to think through something really important, quiet contemplation just isn't enough. The thoughts that go through my head tend to be disjointed and it's too easy for me to stray off topic (as evidenced by last Saturday's post!). I feel like I need to make my thoughts concrete, and there are two ways to do this: write or talk. I write an awful lot, and I always have. But I am realizing that I talk a lot too.

Sometimes on Sunday mornings I go for walks. I like to be outside, so long as it's not below freezing, and it's good thinking time. I have often found, though, that I have to work really hard to keep from talking to myself. My impulse is to think aloud, but it's one thing to talk somewhere no one can possibly hear, and it's another thing to walk around in places where morning church-goers can see my lips move and wonder. Don't worry - I'm generally able to resist the impulse. It's just interesting to me that I am so inclined to speak my thoughts when no one is around. In one of my classes last year we talked a lot about how our thinking and learning and acting in the world is inherently social. Even our individual thoughts can be considered social interactions. I won't go into detail on the theory right here, but it makes perfect sense to me, because all my thinking takes the form of communication, even if it's just communication with myself.

One last thought on the topic. When I read my scriptures this afternoon, I looked up a cross-reference and found myself in Romans 8, one of my favorite chapters in the New Testament. I began reading, and instinctively (because I was in my room and no one was listening) Ivoiced the words that I was reading. Something about voicing those words infused them with the Spirit in a way that I don't think would have happened if I simply let them run through my mind. My scripture reading has been a little stagnant for several weeks, maybe even months, but today was amazing, and I wondered at the power of the spoken word. Because I think there is power in the spoken word. There is power in bearing testimony, and in praying aloud - some of my most meaningful prayers have been spoken. I wonder what it is that causes speaking to infuse words with power like that?