Blink or Think: Be Here now

Be Here Now: Blink or Think

A decade ago, while still consulting heavily, I entered the office of the President of a Billion $ business. The brass-plated desk-ornament in the middle of his desk gave one simple admonition: “Be Here Now!” This leader wanted everyone to be present. When I ask myself or you “Was heisst Denken?” I am, to begin with, asking myself to be here now, to be present. I am asking myself, and I am asking each of you as well, to locate that way, that path on the way to; and, to be here now, to be present and accounted for.

Our current situation is one that calls for thinking; it is one that calls for each of us to be fully present, to be engaged to be here now. If we believe Thomas Friedman’s presentation in That Used to be Us, we are a divided nation in decline, one that has brought itself to this precipitous predicament. We have failed our country, our citizen, our nation’s children - our own gift to the future - in that we have failed to invest in our future. We see it now in our dearth, in our unemployment; in our inability to generate meaningful, fully engaging work; in the homeless, the under-employed. We see it in this State’s decision to cut back on education; its decision not to invest in much-needed infrastructure and renewal efforts; in our ever-widening gap between those who have and those who have not. Rather than attend to the now, we turn away. We choose not to attend to what calls for thinking; instead we blink and we turn away.

It is not unexpected that we blink; that we turn our backs on what calls for thinking; that we turn back to our comfortable lives; turn on the Tube, and plug in un-thinkingly to what Thomas Pynchon referred to as “mindless pleasure”. In fact, a highly popular “pundit”, Malcolm Gladwell incites us to blink. His book Blink: the power of thinking without thinking admonishes us to “blink – don’t think”.

Whereas by contrast, in his 5th lecture, Heidegger begins: “What is called thinking? We must guard against the blind urge to snatch at a quick answer in the form of a formula. We must stay with the question. We must pay attention to the way in which the question asks: what is called thinking, what does call for thinking?” Our present now calls for thinking. We turn away, however. We blink.

“What does that mean? Blink is related to Middle English blenchen, which means deceive, and to blenken, blinken, which means gleam or glitter. To blink – that means to play up and set up a glittering deception which is then agreed upon as true and valid –with the mutual tacit understanding not to question…”(lecture VII).

While I see many of us trying to solve the issues of today, I see equal or greater numbers who turn away. Regardless of party affiliation, we no longer can turn away. We cannot, however, solve any of the current problems by blind adherence to party lines. Nor can we solve today’s issues neither through rancorous argument nor partisan paralysis. We cannot take Gladstone’s advice and decide what is important based on 2 seconds of ephemerality and what we knew to be true in that present-now, now long past. We must be present; we must be here now. We must understand and act knowing that “what is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking age is that we are still not thinking.” We need to, we can and we must, get underway, unterwegs zu.