“…
those thoughts that wander through eternity.”
-- John Milton,
“Paradise Lost”
These
days, when I recall my elementary school teachers saying that I had a
“wandering” mind, I actually feel grateful for that unfettered, rambling way of
thinking. Although it’s sometimes fun to pretend
that I carefully manufacture my own thoughts, the truth is they cascade into my
mind -- mostly through reading and conversation -- in a totally undisciplined
and impersonal manner. It’s as if, in Milton’s words, zillions of thoughts
“wander through eternity”, and some of them happen to spill into me as I’m
doing my own kind of wandering. What’s appealing to me about this is that the
thoughts I think have previously spilled into countless other minds before they
reach mine, and thus they bring along to me the immeasurable treasures of
countless thinkers over the centuries. I no more make my own thoughts than a
river makes its own water. Rivers flow because a limitless number of rills,
runnels, and streams flow into them, and I entertain thoughts because innumerable
other thinkers have welcomed in these ambling, dawdling thoughts that forever
“wander through eternity” and fall, for a few moments or hours, into my small, strolling-around
life.
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