Depth of Thought Vs Clarity of Thought

Which one is more important in your view? Let me share an example to distinct the two.

You can research on egg shells of a specific species of turtles for 35 years and can become the only person in the world, an authority and an expert on them.

You can know the exact chemical composition of the shells, say 95.5% calcium, 4.3% zinc and 0.2% magnesium. You can know the differences in this composition that are found in West Coast of South Africa or those in Bahamas. You may even become an expert to know the age of the female turtle by merely looking at its egg shells. You may even be able to predict the gender of the turtles within each shell, after a test that you have developed over the years.

Infact, almost all of us have seen various documentaries about people who have dedicated their lives to very specific causes.

This all knowledge reflects Depth of your thought or work i.e. how deep you have gone into a specific area of knowledge. Depth of knowledge is highly appreciable and helps at numerous levels in a human society, but there is more to it. An important question worth asking before you start your in-depth journey into anything.

The question is: "Is it worth it?" Should this venture have been adopted in the first place?

Would offering your whole life, dedicating your whole life to turtle egg shells is worth the purpose you were send here to this world in the first place?

There are many similar examples of people spending their whole lives for dogs, fishes, or a particular habit, or collection or a cause but the golden question stays: is it worth it?

There is a difference between dedicating one's life to research on human liver disease Vs researching on gay marriages, or turtle-egg-shells, or why cats wag their tales in a particular way.

The answer to this question comes from CLARITY.

How clearly you are able to see things in a perspective or without a perspective, against a background or without a background, in relation to other things or as a stand-alone-object? How do you rank your choices and their impact on you and the people around you? This only comes with clarity.

Dedicating one's life to a single cause is easier as compared to making a selection of balanced, well considered choices, consistenly throughout your life and keeping your commitment to those balanced choices.

Dedicating one's life to create a balanced family with good people and better human beings than previous generation, is sometimes harder than dedicating one's life to a cause like pollution free or green Earth.

Similarly, you can get involved in any idea, or debate and go into as much depth to it as you like. You may research on a particular author or writer or an artist, or a philosopher, or a celebrity and spend your whole life on the venture, but before that, there is one golden question: have you developed the thought clarity about it first?

Clarity, comes first before depth. Always.

Hassan Bukhari (pen name)

Syed Hassan Abbas

Chief Editor

Clarity