It’s late July in the Pacific Northwest, the time of year locals call ‘summer’ which means the rain has been rescheduled to a more convenient weekend. The tomatoes in my backyard are suspiciously green, the sunsets arrive just before bedtime, and the only thing you can count on is the distant perfume of woodsmoke. Fingers crossed it’s from one of my neighbor’s barbecue, not the wildfires. Around here, the sunny season is longer than usual. We might get a full five days this year, maybe even six, if the weather gods are feeling generous. But summer does something rare, it lets your mind meander. It’s the season of daydreaming. Which is, incidentally, where this story begins.

There once was an age when a thought could really make itself at home. No rush, no calendar invites, no expectation to fit itself onto a post-it. A thought back then had ambitions, it wanted to be an epic. If you asked Socrates a simple question, he’d start stroking his beard, stare into the middle distance, and promptly answer with another question, then another, then launch into a debate so long you’d finish your hummus and start thinking about ordering takeout.

Socrates, for what it’s worth, would have made a terrible panelist on a Netflix reality show. Imagine: “Love Is Blind, but for Philosophy.” He’d filibuster every elimination. He’d want a fidget spinner to keep his hands busy while he wondered whether fidget spinners even exist or if they’re just the illusion of motion in a digital age. By the time he finished, the ratings would be gone, the host would have retired, and Netflix would be recommending a documentary called Talking in Circles.

But this is the charm of long thought. The sheer right to ramble, to contradict, to pause and, perhaps, change our mind. The ancient Indians, for example, took meandering thought to Olympic levels. Buddhist councils, they say, stretched on for months. Surely, after all that time, what emerged was more than just enlightenment. And then, of course, there’s the Gita. One epic long thought delivered in 18 chapters and hundreds upon hundreds of rolling, metrical verses, all while standing in the middle of a battlefield. Now, that’s commitment to an argument.

Gandhi and Ambedkar, Nehru and Patel, these were not men who shied away from a good, meandering fight. Their disagreements and agreements during Indian Independence were not just philosophical, they were over the very bones of a new nation: caste, representation, whether the village or the city should be India’s heart. Letters, pamphlets, endless back-and-forth, all in public and none of it blocked or muted.

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, once looked at this tradition and gave it a name: ‘The Argumentative Indian.‘ Sen did not mean it as an insult but as a badge of honor, a recognition that India, at its best, was a place where argument and disagreement were not threats to harmony but its very foundation. Spirited, public debate was the operating system, not a glitch. The arguments themselves weren’t the magic. It was all the quiet thinking that came first, the slow-cooked ideas that made even the most heated debates worth having.

Somewhere along the line, we all got busier, and busier at being busy. The world sped up, and so did our expectations of thought. Where ancient debates took months and a good argument might outlast a monsoon, today even a traffic light feels too slow. Our machines got faster, our networks noisier, and a thousand little prompts, from news feeds to streaming shows now jostle for our attention, each promising instant answers, instant outrage, instant everything. The patient luxury of letting an idea simmer, toying with uncertainty, or tolerating silence has quietly become a rare skill, almost a rebellion. In the age of rapid refresh and ‘next episode’ countdowns, there is simply no space for a thought to unpack its suitcase and stay a while.

Once, knowledge was like a cathedral, spacious, slow to build, requiring patience and time. Now it’s a food truck at a festival, loud, fast, everyone elbowing for attention, and most things gone before you figure out what’s worth trying.

Here’s the bit that should keep us up at night. Civilization-changing thoughts have always taken their time. Let’s pick a weirdly odd but a perfect example. Take blood circulation, a concept so basic now it’s hard to imagine anyone getting it wrong. For centuries, people just assumed blood sloshed about inside you, as if your body were a washing machine set to ‘random.’ Galen, clever but mistaken, convinced the world it all sort of drifted this way and that. Then came Ibn al-Nafis, quietly suggesting there might be more to it. But it took William Harvey, to labor through the evidence, face down the doubters, and prove, slowly, painstakingly, in the face of ridicule and inertia, that blood circulates. It took over a hundred years of patient friction and debate before the world caught on. Every checkup, every diagnosis, every heartbeat today depends on the outcome of that long, stubborn argument.

That’s the point. Big ideas, the kind that shift the ground beneath us, need time and space and, most of all, friction. They need the long thought.

And it turns out, jobs that really matter (teachers, doctors, parents, engineers, the guy who has to explain your health insurance policy) rely on the long thought, not the hot take. The ability to sit quietly with uncomfortable facts, to listen longer than is strictly necessary, is not only rare but the  one skill that sets you apart from the chorus of stamp-sized opinions.

So where, you might wonder, does the long thought hide out these days? I’ll tell you: in the pauses. In the margin notes on a good book. In the fifteen-minute shower where you forget you already washed your hair. In the suspiciously quiet evening walk, phone left at home, where an idea can breathe (hopefully the air quality index isn’t toxic).

Oddly enough, zebras aren’t black with white stripes, or white with black stripes. They’re actually both and also neither. Which feels about right for where the long thought lives. Not at the extremes, but somewhere in the blurry, undefined middle. The best ideas rarely announce themselves in bright colors. They arrive camouflaged, half-glimpsed, sometimes mistaken for something else entirely.

Some of my own longest thoughts have ambushed me during strange rituals or family routines that made no sense at the time. For example, every summer, during mango season, my aunts and uncles insisted that mangoes could only be eaten standing up, usually out in the courtyard of the village house. Officially, it was a kind of tradition, supposedly for good luck but I suspect the real reason was more logistical. Indian mangoes are juicier, messier, almost engineered for maximal chaos. With a surplus of children and a shortage of space, the only solution was to exile us outside, mango juice running down our arms, the cats looking on in dignified horror. For those few minutes, we weren’t thinking about anything in particular just savoring the moment, sticky and sun-soaked. But that’s exactly when the interesting thoughts would appear, slipping in sideways, hiding between bites.

The best thinkers are not the ones with the fastest thumbs or the loudest podcasts. Darwin took the same walk every day, letting his mind wander as aimlessly as his sandwalk. Virginia Woolf stared out the window for hours, half-dreaming sentences. Take Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He could spend weeks on a single page, letting the story ferment, letting each thought linger until it tasted right. Hemingway, too, famously trimmed and rewrote until his sentences were as sharp and clear as the morning after a storm.

So perhaps the only way to resist stamp-size thinking is not to shout louder or post more but to wait it out. To practice the long thought. Maybe even to make a little ritual of it: brew a cup of chai, stare out the window, put on some Chopin or A R Rahman, and let your mind off-leash for a while. If your neighbor thinks you’ve lost it, just say you’re channeling your inner Ted Lasso, optimistic and a little bewildered.

And if you’ve read this far, through all the digressions, metaphors, wildfires, netflix references, and the stubborn voyage of blood, then maybe, just maybe, you’ve given the long thought the homecoming it deserves. If your thumb is itchy to scroll try resisting it for a second longer. Sometimes, the best thoughts aren’t meant to be liked or shared. They’re meant to be lived with, returned to, and on occasion, scribbled on the back of a very…. very large stamp.

crossposted to LinkedIn.