The past and the future are infinite and meet at the moment we are thinking.
Our thinking can reach into infinity.
A friend recently posted a question asking about the difference between thinking and feeling. The French poet Paul Valery said:
"Sometimes I think and sometimes I am."
[Tantot je pense et tantot je suis]
When we think, we leave the world of feeling. Valery says we leave the world altogether. We engage in a dialogue within ourselves. In this inner conversation we examine an idea, weigh it, try to find its worth, but all of this is done within our minds.
When external reality intrudes we stop thinking and return to living in the present, to sensing or feeling the world around us. When we feel we take our world through our five senses and act or react. We can take in that information and react immediately, or we can, as the expression goes, stop and think.
Modern English usage hardly makes a difference between the words think and feel, but they are different to the point of being opposites in how they inhabit our lives.
From the outside, the difference is just as big. A person who is feeling, who is reacting to the world, will show that reaction. We see a friend and smile: see an enemy and frown. When we think, especially when we are deep in thought, we look like someone in a daze, or half awake. We say a person is "lost in thought." The metaphor is right. The person lost in thought is not fully present in this world.
When I think, I may sit and stare and not notice someone entering the room. When I ride in traffic in Philadelphia, I am looking, listening in every way sensing my environment and reacting to multiple inputs every second.
The graph above of thinking is especially evident in those who create. Whether art or science, thinking remains hidden within the thinker until the painting, or story, or building, or equation, or breakthrough formula expresses the thoughts hidden inside the mind.
For more on thinking, The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt is fascinating.
