At the beginning of June, I moved to a town I had never visited, to live in a house I had never seen, and to work with people I had only spoken to over Zoom. My family dropped me off, and once I had all of my things arranged, I sat on the bed and had a strange but very familiar feeling wash over me: What do I do now? I had the whole night ahead of me, but everyone I know and everything I do was scattered everywhere but here. The empty span of time ahead of me felt dizzying. So, I just sat there in the what-now feeling, thinking. I began to think about why this feeling was so familiar to me, and I thought of all of the other transitions I have had like this throughout my whole life: from the five times I moved as a kid, to the move into college, to my trip studying abroad, I began to realize that this is all old hat to me. I have done this before, and sure enough, I have done this again.
In my time so far interning at Girls on the Run Northwest Indiana, I have been given many opportunities like this to sit and think. Certainly, to think about what I am doing. When sorting through data of school after school, exploring websites, Free and Reduced Lunch Rates, number of students, and how the different regions creatively allocate their resources into different forms of school buildings and structures, it is hard to keep one’s mind from thinking about what you are doing. But beyond what I am doing in the moment, I have had time to think about how vividly this data shows the vast difference in how each child is being shaped by their communities. Time to think about what kind of agencies we have in the shaping, individually or through programs like GOTR, and how adults have been and continue to be shaped by their communities in the same way as kids. My brain grounded in these numbers or more menial tasks like stuffing envelopes, my mind has been free to go swirling to how I have been shaped by the communities I have been a part of, and how structures in all societies are formed based in the context of these communities. School, family, friends, towns, religions, countries… we are all constantly shaping the world that is constantly shaping us.
As a sociology major, and a long-time member of planet Earth, such trains of thought are not overwhelming nor new for me. However, the amount of time that I have had to think them are both overwhelming and new. Often, I fear that when I get into un-timed thought spirals like these that I will never get out. Or worse yet, that they will choke themselves out into a nothing of thoughtlessness. These anxieties spike when my hybrid work schedule allows time for my thoughts to cover and recover every topic that pops up, occasionally even circling themselves back into a deafeningly unfamiliar silence.
In this silence, just like in the emptiness of the first night, I am faced with both a concern and a solution. This time, I am reminded of once when, having joked that I am known by those close to me to overthink things, a dear friend of mine replied that he does not believe that overthinking is a thing. This is because he has never worried that someone was going to overthink something but has known many people to be concerned about someone underthinking things. Now, thinking back on it, in the thoughts or in the silence of having completed thinking them, I believe that he is right, and that there is no worry in thinking however much my mind chooses to think, because at least I have had the opportunity not to underthink things. And, with the contexts of what facets of the world I am shaped by and am shaping, I feel just how privileged I am to have time to think about thinking.
- by Katherine Naylor, Girls on the Run