Thinking liberates me. It allows me to break free from the cages of my conceptualized reality. In a certain sense, critical thinking empowers the individual with the ability to appraise and assess a situation based on varying standards. And I asked myself what is the source of my freedom, that throws me into a state of anomie and vertigo? Is it a framework, method or mindset?

Critical thinking encompasses assessment, creation, negation, assimilation, modification, self-destruction, deconstruction, association, preservation, expolation and more. It is always in a mode of evolution, self renewal and self discovery. It feeds upon the experiences of the past and the present, growing alongside the thinker, seemingly having a life of its own. It thus, cannot be a framework, for it is everchanging, always evolving.

It cannot be a method either, for it is the result of the subject's pre-existing knowledge base together with his/hers experiences applied to varied circumstances, through various thought processes and criteria. I cannot agree that a single method will work for all circumstances, for an assessment from multiple points of views.

It is almost as if Hegel is right again. It is as if in critical thinking, our thoughts have a life, as in through the process of synthesis and antithesis, it is slowly reaching towards the Absolute. Or maybe the Hindus got it right, where Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva signify the basic elements in our thought processes, in the action of birth, preservation and destruction.

A night jog inspired me to compare life to a walk in the park. We are like moths flitting from a lamp post to another, in search for meaning and truths. For most part of our journeys through the park, we will be in the dark, stumbling our ways towards the light. We will cling onto the partial truths and temporary understandings that emerge. In our lives, especially in our early lives, we had and will have to abandon many of our beliefs and convictions towards what we understand to be a more reasonable explanation of our world.

I think life is about courage, the courage to let go of what we often hold to be the shore to seek new horizons. Perhaps, thinking is about courage too; the courage to let go of our lifebuoys and sink. It is about the courage to ask why, to destroy one's own walls that shut out the external world, to destroy what one built up to protect oneself and in process liberate oneself from oneself, even if that means losing one's own way.

Critical thinking then, perhaps is just a mindset, a habit, a conscious will to ask the first why and a thousand more. Perhaps the final question would be: Why ask "Why"? Why the need for meaning?

And the moths fly.