The devaluization of thought has been on my head lately. It occurred to me that on any given day, I'm probably consuming 2-5 thoughts that click with me, as if they could resonate throughout my life and I could base the entirety of my thoughts around them. One good Nautilus article. One good poem I feel the need to read out loud. A Youtube analysis video on a great movie. A song I want to become friends with. These ideas spend increasingly shorter amounts of time in my head as I encounter more of them.

I yearn for that feeling I got the first week of college, when the many introductory professors had filled my mind with persuasive arguments for how their field encapsulated the entirety of human experience, and it clicked to me while sitting in a coffee shop- "Everything is connected!" I spent that week starstruck, in love with an idea and the way it danced, the way it gave space and voice to other ideas it interacted with- if an idea was a person, this "Everything is connected!" would be the kind of person who walked with gravitas, would ask questions and be genuinely inquisitive of the answers she received, would be the type of hiker who made sure to stay slightly behind the slowest person, who knew that in their head, always seeking to bring the best out of people.

Over time, I've treated "Everything is connected!" terribly. I've danced with tens of thousands of other ideas and there's an embarrassment of being seen with her. She is pop poetry, and it seems as though the more I encounter, the less likely I'll ever enjoy her the same way, the longer it'll take for me to recall how it felt, the easier it'll be for me to confuse her for someone else.

Just another stepping stone to bigger ideas, I guess. I never want to take that away from someone else.