On the things we think about

When I was a kid (truthfully, until recently), I sometimes asked my mum what she was thinking about. I always thought she was lying when she’d say “nothing in particular” or “what I need to buy from the store” or “what I will cook for dinner”, etc. The thing is that I would always be preoccupied with thinking about other things, things with little direct connection to my life, things like what it must it have been like to describe and name a new illness such a AIDS or (even tuberculosis if you were Robert Koch), why does it matter so much to people whether their religious beliefs will be proven right or wrong after death if they’re dead anyway when they see the definitive truth, etc. I wondered why mum never told me that she would think of things like this. Surely, I thought, everyone has abstract thought they dedicate time to. Why would mum not tell me what her “other” non-mundane thoughts were about? Surely a person has more than everyday-survival thoughts, right?

In the last few weeks, due to some difficulties that have affected my family, I have ended up becoming a guardian for my teenage nephew. And you know what? I have finally come to understand that my mum was not lying to me; she was just too busy being a parent to me and my four siblings to have time for non-mundane thought! I have in the last few weeks found myself actually thinking about and planning things that I would normally have left until the last minute, the boring stuff, the mundane stuff: what would be appropriate meals, what would be appropriate discipline, what are appropriate expectations, etc. It really does take up time to be thinking, more so because of my inexperience at this. Yet in a way it is also, I think, a blessing because having someone depend on you forces you to return the centre of Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory of human development. Sometimes a person can spend so much time thinking about how to change the world, how to change the future, about how things of the world should be, that you can forget that changing the world starts at home, with families, with ourselves.