“The mind stops with recognition.”
– Josh Waitzkin
We recognize something, we put a label on it, and we put it in a mental box. This can be constructive for higher-order thinking because now we have a mental model of this thing. We can chunk it and move on to integrating new information.
But as soon as we put a label on it, we close the door on further exploration and evaluation. We close the door on curiosity. We also close the door on depth.
To use a personal example, I’ve been doing jiu jitsu for seven years and my ankle locks are dogshit. The straight ankle lock is deceptively simple and that’s partially why I’m seldom able to finish it. My mind has frozen at the recognition of the ankle lock instead of probing it with greater curiosity, challenging my assumptions, asking questions, really exploring it without putting it in a box.
I also see this tendency in other students. There’s this little linguistic tic that I’ve picked up on. Most of the time, if you ask someone, “Are you following me?” Or, “Does anyone have any questions?” They’ll say something like, “Makes sense.”
What they’re actually saying is, “I’m in this recognition frame of mind where what you’re saying stands for itself and is apparent to me.”
But really, we should be making sense instead of saying, “Makes sense.” Instead of saying, “Makes sense,” we should be about the process of making it into sense. And that process never stops.
That’s not to say, I’m never going to use an ankle lock in competition because I haven’t fully mastered it. But rather, I strive to constantly re-engage with the question of, what is the ankle lock? What is the optimal positioning here? What makes the break more devastating?
And that’s how I can stop myself from becoming static. That’s the intellectual and embodied behavior that prevents you from becoming the 300-pound bullshido master, who no longer spars. His students whisper in hushed tones, “Master no longer spars because if he so much as touches you, he’ll kill you.”
That shit comes to fruition because we stop the process of making sense. We settle into this recognition frame of mind. We default to the passivity of “Makes sense.”
The alternative is to be in this constant cognition and experiential frame of mind. To think with depth and to experience with profundity.
Category: Inner Work
Tag: Makes Sense/Make it Sense
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