Guy Reams (00:01.23)
This is day 87. When is the last time you just sat and pondered? Just sitting and pondering, I think is a lost art form. Many people, when they go on vacations or take a break, they fill their lives with things that keep their mind preoccupied. They watch movies, they stream videos, they listen to music, they do activities.
But when was the last time that you personally sat and just pondered? Like just sat in a comfortable chair and looked out at the world and just sat and thought about things. Just let things roll over in your mind and come and go naturally with the ebb and flow of your thoughts. Just to continue to ponder until the thoughts petered out and then they came back again, crystallizing on what was truly the most important thing to think about.
Just sitting and pondering is an extremely important thing to do because if we're constantly doing, reacting and consuming, we tend to forget this very, powerful inner voice that we have in ourselves. So I think that just the act of sitting and looking out a window or sitting on your back porch or.
going out in nature and just sitting on a tree stump somewhere and just looking out and just thinking has a lot of benefits. I think the first benefit is clarity. When life is full of motion and our thoughts tend to stack on top of each other, all these unfinished, unexamined things going on in our lives, sitting quietly and doing nothing and just thinking, let's all those thoughts settle.
patterns start to emerge. Things that were or felt very complicated now become very simple. Not because the problems in our life change, but because your mind actually has time to process it and see it clearly. That's why I think sitting and pondering provides clarity. Second, I think it provides discernment. Pondering is not a lazy activity.
Guy Reams (02:27.654)
I think we tend to think it's lazy because we're doing nothing. We're not doing something. But it's actually not a very passive activity. It's very deliberate. allows you process things that are going on in your mind to weigh ideas, understand the motives of yourself and the motives of other people. Helps you really think through consequences. This is how people gain wisdom. I don't think people realize this.
You can gain intelligence and knowledge by learning and reading books and listening to things. But where wisdom grows is when you really have time to sit and think through the consequences of your actions. Many poor decisions are made not because of people are not intelligent, but because they lack time to truly reflect on what they're doing.
Pondering also allows you to reconnect with meaning. When you're too busy, you can stay productive, but it disconnects you from why you are doing something in the first place. When you ponder, it gets you back to your real values, your purpose, your faith, your convictions. It's often in stillness or when we're still that we remember what actually matters to us.
Fourth, think pondering creates what I would call integration. Experiences that you have in life don't automatically become lessons to you. They need time to be digested, to be processed. When you sit and ponder, it allows you to learn from failure, to learn from success, to understand your emotions, and to integrate that into something useful.
insights or potentially resolve. A lot of ideas that I come up with in my life have come from moments of solitude where I sit and ponder. I think finally the most important thing those that learn to ponder build a strong sense of inner resilience. When you're comfortable sitting with your own thoughts you become less dependent on noise. Validation.
Guy Reams (04:51.414)
or even distraction. There's a quiet strength that builds up in you that allows you to act under pressure, allows you to act under uncertainty, and allows you to show true leadership. So those that sit and ponder build strong inner resilience. I think there's also an element of humility to it. You don't have the answer to everything.
You don't need to know everything. In fact, oftentimes the greatest truths reveal themselves very slowly over time. In many religious faiths, pondering is how people, they teach people to ponder, to meditate. It's probably more important for us in our lives to learn to listen rather than just to speak all the time or to get our voice heard.
We live in a culture where everybody talks about being heard or getting your voice out. But maybe sometimes we should start to think about instead of trying to force an outcome, we should sit and listen more. So in short, pondering doesn't slow life down. Actually, it aligns your life to your true purposes. When you sit and ponder, you find direction.
rather than having other people impose their direction upon you.