On Sitting With Hard Problems

I have a confession. The hardest thing I do all day is sit with a question for ten minutes without looking anything up.

The reflex is unbelievably strong. The moment I encounter friction — a concept I half-understand, a number I’m not sure about, a name I can’t quite remember — my hands move toward the keyboard before my mind has even decided to. The friction goes away. So does any chance of the friction becoming a thought.

For most of human history, hard questions had no immediate answer. You sat with them. You walked around with them. You let them follow you into the shower, into bed, into the next morning. The answer, when it came, came slowly and felt earned.

The internet has not made the hard questions easier. It has just made it possible to outsource the discomfort of not knowing. And the discomfort of not knowing is, it turns out, where most of my best thinking used to happen.

I’m trying to build the muscle back. When I notice the impulse to immediately look something up, I try to set a timer for ten minutes and just sit there with the question. Often I find I knew the answer. Often I find that I generate a much better question than the one I started with. Often I find I had no idea, and I look it up after the timer rings, and the answer means more because I had to want it for ten minutes first.

It is a small discipline. I think it might be one of the most important disciplines.