Some small bit

Today's ODAT reading suggested that there must be 'some small bit of time during the day when we can lift our thoughts out of the swamp of confusion'.

I would go much further. When I'm not actively engaged in discourse with others or a mentally taxing activity, I turn my thoughts to God or fill my immediate airwaves with spiritual content (whether words or music).

Is that extreme? No more extreme than thinking one's own thoughts. Ask all the people around you how much of the day they spend thinking your thoughts. Ask yourself how often others do actually ask what you think about something. It's vanishingly rare. And yet one thinks one's own thoughts constantly.

To think one's own thoughts, musing about one's impressions or opinions about this or that, is no more eccentric or monomaniacal than it would be to muse constantly about asparagus or the War of the Spanish Succession. But such obsessions might discharge into being very good at growing or cooking asparagus or into an uncommon depth of knowledge and understanding about a genuinely interesting topic.

The same cannot be said about thinking one's own thoughts. Not only is that eccentric and monomaniacal: it is usually destructive and damaging, not to mention base, baseless, dilettantish, solipsistic, and casuistical.

In this light, turning one's thoughts constantly to God reveals itself to be an adequate and suitable countermeasure to a rapacious, ravaging pathology.