Thinking

I think G and I have decided where we are going on holiday – well, we already knew it was Scotland, but not where in Scotland. I think we’re not going to the Argyll region. We have booked our flight back to London and that’s it so far. We haven’t booked:

- The journey up there. This will be by train. We can’t come back by train due to engineering work hence booking the flight.
- Where we are staying.
- A hire car so we can get about (and G can practice driving again, having not done so for a few years)

So quite a bit left to do then and less than a month is which to do it, but at least we can get back. Add to that the slight apprehension of meeting G’s family while we are in Scotland and there is an interesting time ahead.

One of the many books I am reading at the moment is Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, which has an interesting quote

“There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think - which is fundamentally a moral problem - must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted C3 children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality.”

This book was first published in 1933 but I thought it was a thought provoking quote even today. I am actually really interested in people’s ability to think and how it is developed – Edward de Bono’s books are an interesting approach to this – but that aside ultimately I think most people do aspire to a comfortable life and so challenging things around us and in our own lives can become secondary to just going with the flow, just because it is easier. I don’t really know where I am going with this, but I found something challenging about the quote.