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Full disclosure: I have thought a lot about this essay on
not thinking. I love to think about ideas for hours on end.  As a journalist and college professor I make
my living coming up with interesting thoughts to think. But I am also a
recreational thinker. In fact, I may be addicted to thinking. And as I explore
ways to heal from childhood trauma, I am trying to break my thinking habit. 

I grew up in a home where thinking was put on a pedestal above
all other human traits. Cooking, changing the oil in a car, putting up a tent �
these were things my parents did not know how to do. But, boy, could they
think. My dad called it “intellectual stimulation.� And immersing oneself in interesting
thought was always the goal, whether by talking to strangers about their lives
or discussing ideas at the dinner table or mulling things over on a walk or
reading a literary classic. Even when Dad was at the end stage of Alzheimer’s
and in an assisted living facility, he was still thinking about stimulating his
intellect. He complained that the other residents had nothing interesting to say
(not surprising, given their condition) and he preferred discussions with the
facility’s caregivers.

I remember that throughout my childhood Dad was always
filling legal pads with his ideas. He was constantly thinking about books he
wanted to write and inventions he had dreamed up that he might one day patent. He
was always plotting, scheming, dreaming. Dad made lists of things he needed to
do to turn these ideas into a reality and searched out books he might read to
give him more ideas.

When I was little, I wanted to follow in Dad’s cerebral footsteps.
I remember that I used to announce, “I’m going to go think to myself.� And then
I would sit in my rocking chair in my bedroom and drift deep into thought. It
was comforting to imagine new worlds and ideas, dreaming up my own stories.
When my parents were yelling at each other, or I was having trouble in school,
becoming lost in thought was a good place to be.

Going to college and double majoring in journalism and
comparative literature was thinking heaven. I remember sometimes walking out of
an Honors lit class almost dizzy from thinking so hard and enjoying it so much.
In college, I found a brainy community who, like Dad, was devoted to seemingly
non-stop intellectual stimulation. After graduating, things got even better when
I was paid as a writer for my journalistic investigations and cerebral musings.
My entire identity revolved around my ability to use my mind. I was my mind. And if there was something
bothering me, all I had to do was slip inside my head to escape it.

But life as a middle-aged adult was a lot harder than during
my blissful college years. I had a child to raise and a job to keep. A
mortgage. Deadlines. A dad with Alzheimer’s. Two failed marriages. Over the
years, my non-stop thinking went from an activity that was akin to skipping
through a field of wildflowers to being more like a hamster in a wheel. I still
thought a lot about the stories I was writing and the classes I was teaching.
But, mostly, it was a steady drip, drip, drip of anxious thoughts about things
I needed to do or conversations that I might have. Yet, I remained as wedded as
ever to the belief that my world revolved around my mind. If I had problems, the
only solution was to think harder. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then my mind turned on me. Maybe it was seeing Dad with
his stack of legal pads in the Alzheimer’s unit and knowing that throughout his
adult life he never actually carried out a single idea he had written down. I
became aware there was a certain futility to my non-stop thinking and that
always musing on this and that was not necessarily productive or even healthy. What
to do? I thought harder, all day and all night. I didn’t know any other way to
be. Despite utter exhaustion, the hamster kept at it, even speeding up. Memories
from childhood—thoughts I had long been able to keep locked away—began to
terrorize me. I couldn’t� sleep. I had panic attacks. I was trapped inside my
head and it was hell.

Desperate to get my thoughts back under control, I went to
see a psychiatrist. She told me the solution was to think less—actually,
sometimes not at all.  She said I was basically
making myself crazy with intellectual stimulation. This was earth-shattering
advice. For me, the idea of not thinking was the equivalent of not living. It
was like telling me to stop breathing.

Nevertheless, I heeded her advice because I was desperate
for peace of mind. I started studying the writings of Buddhist teachers like
Tich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron. I also attended mindfulness classes and
attempted to practice guided meditation. I started to realize that when I was
thinking, I was almost always mulling over something in the future or in the
past. If I could sometimes manage to be solidly rooted in the present moment, I
could theoretically get the hamster to take breaks.

French philosopher Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore
I am.� But Tich Nhat Hanh writes that such a mindset actually means, “I think,
therefore I am not here in the present moment.� The Pure Land school of
Buddhism revolves around the idea of attaining enlightenment and eternal
happiness in a kind of heaven called the Pure Land. Tich Nhat Hanh promotes the
idea that heaven is here and now if you can stop dwelling in the past and the future.
“Let us enjoy the Pure Land right now in the spirit of living happily in the
present moment,� he writes.

Eckhart Tolle, author of the bestselling book, The Power of
Now, is the high priest of living in the present moment. He has a term for
people like my dad and me: “a compulsive thinker.� And Tolle asserts that
intellectual brilliance does not result from compulsive thinking. “The mind is
a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very
destructive…the instrument has taken you over,� writes Tolle. “The compulsive
thinker lives in a state of separateness, in an insanely complex world of
continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects ever-increasing
fragmentation of the mind.�

Both Tolle and Tich Nhat Hanh maintain that devoting a part
of each day to living in the present moment rather than constantly lost in
thought brings both mental clarity as well as a deep, steadfast peace of mind. Tolle
simple calls this state “being� or “presence.�

But old habits are hard to break. The mindfulness classes
and group meditations did not work so well for me. I could not get my mind to
stop. If nothing else, I was thinking about how I was still thinking. Or I was
thinking about how the person next to me was breathing loud. Drip. Drip. Drip. 

Fortunately, I have been a hiker my entire life and I
realized that the only place where I could get my thoughts to stop was in the
wild. As a child, I had always wandered alone in the woods and found deep
comfort from the trees and birds and sky. Nature was far more soothing than my
rocking chair. But as an adult I started using my daily hikes and trail runs as
just one more place to be lost in thought and figure things out. If I could not
solve a problem at my desk, I would search for the answer when I was in the
forest. But, as Tich Nhat Hanh would rightly point out, I was actually not in
the forest, I was in my head.

Once I became committed to breaking my thinking addiction, I
approached my daily hikes in the forest near my home in a completely different
way. Going solo whenever possible (except for my dog Sunny), I began roaming
cross country rather than on trails so I could be as close to wild nature as
possible. I turned my phone off. I focused on my surroundings and using my
senses: the smell of the ponderosa pine; the sound of the woodpecker; the delicate
purple color of the lupine. I would imagine myself a sponge that was soaking in
all the beauty around me. When my mind attempted to drift into my “to do� list,
I would just take a deep breath of fresh air and fix on a specific tree,
bringing myself back into the present.

I found that when I was already in a state of presence in
nature, I could sometimes have moments that were utterly transcendent. Moments
of wild beauty, like the view from a hilltop at sunset, connected me not only
to the place but to my true self, the person beyond the intellect. The translucent
pink sky framed by a rainbow was not a thought but an experience that went
straight to my core.  In those moments, I
was not my mind. I was everything around me. I was the sunset.

It has been seven years since I gave up chronic thinking as
a lifestyle, although I am constantly challenged by slipping back into hamster-in-wheel
mode. In addition to bringing me more peace of mind, my daily hikes have also
gifted me my best ideas. When I am climbing up a steep hill and saying hello to
the trees, the perfect idea will explode into my mind out of nowhere. Dad would
have never believed it, but not thinking during my wanderings in the woods has
made me a happier person as well as a more creative and productive thinker.

In her book, The Nature Fix, author Florence Williams calls
this phenomenon “brain rest.� And it only happens when humans are in nature,
most often in “restorative landscapes� that induce “soft fascination.�

While the modern emphasis on mindfulness may seem fairly
new, it is actually an idea that was at the heart of why the United States
established the world’s first national parks. These wild landscapes offered an
increasingly stressed out nation a place for brain rest.

Williams points out in her book that national parks founding
father Frederick Law Olmstead saw America’s awe-inspiring great outdoors as an
unmatched sanctuary for brain rest. “Viewing nature,� he wrote in 1865, “employs
the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens
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Annette McGivney is the author of , and the Search for Heaven on Earth. For more about
her book and learning how nature heals visit: . She is also
founder of the non-profit Healing Lands Project, which funds wilderness trips
for child victims of domestic violence. For more go to: .