catapult magazine

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine — they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book for instance — you might as well take this book along with them.”

—Laurence Sterne, Tristam Shandy

Any psychologists out there?

I was wondering what it meant psychologically (or spiritually) if one is prone to tangents and digressions in speech and writing. (I’m writing this because I have a friend who digresses alot and uses too many parenthetical statements (although they are delightful (just not always necessary))))

I think continuous digressions and/or the inability to control them is the sign of an unfocused mind and nonlinear thinking. Period. Even if the person is intelligent, they do their intelligence no justice by taking so long to get to the crux of their message. It shows a lack of self-discipline that they can’t slow down to organize their thoughts and prefer to blast ahead and throw every which thought into the receiver’s lap.

That was my mental take on digressions. Spiritually, I don’t think it indicates an insufficient faith or anything like that, but I wonder if such mental chaos prevents these people from fulling focusing on God at any given time for any given amount of time. You know, “be still …”

I think a lot of it has to do with our culture. I grew up watching 15 second blurbs on Sesame Street. Now I point and click to different websites every 15 seconds.

The benefit to that wiring of our minds is the ability to multitask and consume diverse bits of info quickly. The downfall is our minds can be easily distracted. So often when reading the Bible or living my life, often times I get caught up in peripheral matters and lose sight of the big picture.

My pastor thinks a scheme of the Enemy against our generation is trying to make us too busy. It’s the “I want to be on the most pages in the high school yearbook” mentality. By doing this we focus on activities and accomplishments rather than a relationship with the Lord.

Hmmmm. I’m not sure a digression represents a short attention span. Some digressions can be quite lengthy, complicated thoughts on thier own. Likewise, with deference to Mrsanniep, I am not sure they represent an unordered mind. I think they certainly represent non-linear thinking, but without non-linear thinking, my guess is we would not have wonderful stories, nor inventions, nor discoveries. There is something about hat leap that the mind can take into the realm of the non-sequitur that is quite wondrous.