Thinking
"There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
- Shakespeare in Hamlet: Act II, Scene II.
Reading Hamlet in my final year in high school was a arduous task. Not because it was hard to read - the content, the themes and the storyline were fairly easy to follow along with. It was more that I could no longer enjoy it on face value because it became a job - an element of my education that my worth would become evaluated through.
More relevantly, in all this over-reading of the text, the essential messages of some intrusively simple lines were often lost. We delved into "what the author was thinking, what did they want their audience to get from this" in almost every single line, word, overarching theme. It was a monotonous process, reading left to right, severing lines and text, reading between the lines, wondering "why did he cut the sentence and affix the remainder of it to the next line?". Why the hell, in my honest and humble opinion, should it matter?
Well, as the story goes, it does matter. It matters because society, and our literary upbringing suggests and enforces this idea that it should. But years later, as I sit in the library of my place of tertiary education avoiding the readings for this week's Constitutional Law topic, I come across a Ted Talk which focuses on "Practicing Emotional Hygiene". Amongst so many other good thoughts and references to mental health and avoiding rumination and taking action when we're lonely, Guy Winch quotes a line from Shakespeare's Hamlet which has been annotated and read into to infer that it is man's mind, and the process of thinking which spawns action. For example - that another man's woman is not, of herself in her basic existence, bad, but thinking about her in a lustful way is. A sinful mind ticking away, etcetera, etcetera...
What struck me, very suddenly, was an alternate meaning behind this famous utterance. That when we dwell on things, when our mind suddenly jumps and acts on a situation that we find ourselves in, it instantly becomes something either good or bad. We begin to ruminate. To replay thoughts over and over without consequence of this other than the reality that nothing actually becomes of the thoughts other than the thoughts themselves. Ultimately, the thinking makes the misfortune or "badness" for want of a better word that Hamlet himself so often ruminated over. And I, on that note, am just another Hamlet.
