Perhaps wanting more of such bliss, I downloaded and printed pages of quotes shortly after enrolling at JKUAT in May 2007 to pursue an engineering degree. Though the quotes also moved me, only a few stuck in my head, especially a lengthy one on thinking clearly.
In 2010, I longed to re-read that lengthy quote on thinking clearly. Since I had misplaced the quotes I printed at JKUAT, the only option was to google it, which I did. I must have been delighted when I finally found it.
The quote was from Edward O. Sisson, a former University of Montana president. It touched me so much when I re-read it in 2010 that I wrote a story about how I struggled with confusion and used the following words from it to state why it is so important for us to think clearly:
Our national success will depend largely upon the development of a generation of men and women who have formed a love and habit of clear thinking and who can do their part in solving the problems that confront civilized man today.Probably to show how we can learn to think clearly, Sisson said that when Abe Lincoln was a boy, he would become disturbed when he read something ambiguous. That, according to Sisson, was a desire for clear thinking that is found in every child and good teachers know it.
I agreed with Sisson when he said that far more important than any particular piece of knowledge, than geography or arithmetic or spelling, is this love of clearness in our mental life and instinctive hatred of confusion and obscurity.
He clarified that a mere knowledge of facts, important as that is, is no safeguard against confusion. A conscious desire and resolve to think clearly is the true remedy.
From the way I understood the quote, Sisson believed thinking clearly is the key to avoiding superstition, gullibility and fallacious reasoning - the great enemies of intellectual life.
Those of us who have struggled with confusion may gain some wisdom from this humorist's remark that Sisson quoted: "It was never my ignorance that done me up, but the things I know'd that wasn't so."
As for me, I have worked myself out of confusion by writing often. Re-reading what I have written has given me a sense of who I am and what I stand for, and in the process, I have found my own voice which I now believe is the sign of attaining mental clarity.
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RECOMMENDATION: If you've enjoyed the above story on thinking clearly, you might also enjoy another one on "Developing Mental Clarity" which I wrote seven years ago.
