Is it time for slow thinking?

The other day I went to a Celebration of Life for Thomas, a great pal of mine who had deteriorated quickly and left us without much warning or farewell. 

The event was in North Hatley, a six-hour drive from where I live in Prince Edward County, around Montreal, through the glorious hills, farms and orchards of the Eastern Townships. I decided to make a road trip out of it with detours to Lac Brome, Knowlton, and Sutton on the way back.

I called him Aristotle Thomas.  He had a philosophical bent of mind that went underappreciated. This deep thinking was most manifest one-on-one in fraught situations. After his brother Michael died, and toward the end of his life, when he was dealing with auto-immune and his wife’s dementia, Thomas became eager to spread the word of Wise Living.

After my own twin brother, Paul, died a few years ago, Thomas and I developed a Socratic relationship which took on the flavour of a spiritual guide evoked in Tuesdays with Morrie. I called it, “slow thinking with Thomas.”

We started to have regular phone conversations, two or three times a month, which took some getting used to. He had a unique rhythm of conversing which called for adjustments to regular phone protocols. A lot of silences, pauses, and adagio movements. Sometimes I thought Thomas had hung up so tortured was the conversation. 

At first, when he called and I picked up, there would be long delays which I took to be a robo call waiting to be connected to a centre in Mumbai, but I knew from call ident it was Thomas. Had he fallen asleep after dialing? We know he enjoyed his naps. 

But then I got to recognize the signatures. Sporadic grunts, staccato breathing, and the jangle of a belt buckle as he adjusted positions — all indications that he was preparing to speak. Thomas was always quite pleased with his girth — it gave him a low center of gravity for his excellent powder skiing. He entered a room like a Buddhist monk, a protruding tummy announcing his proud arrival.

The opening of these calls, with the growling and attendant noises, sounded like something tantric. No, I don’t know what it means either, but AI says it is about delayed gratification and deep connection. But then came the most important signal that it was Thomas on the phone. I would hear a sharp bark to his wife — “no, not now, I am on the phone” — but how would she know because he wasn’t saying anything.

Once I had figured all this out, I looked forward to our regular calls, knowing when the phone rang and I picked up, I could keep cooking, or eating, or streaming a Netflix documentary.

They were serious convos heaped with gravitas that concluded with profound insights.  He would wrap things up with a pay-off — “you can’t be there without going there,” or, “cutting  hay is like being reborn.” Another, “when you lose your only sibling, friends become replacements.” All good thoughts once I had worked out what they meant. He took his time because he wanted to think slowly about big things. No rush to judgment or TikTok dance moves. He taught me the value of thinking slowly and thinking deeply before talking.

On the drive back after the Life Celebration, I took a detour to the celebrated Three Pines bistro, under the Lac Brome bookstore in Knowlton, home of the Inspector Gamache mystery series. I settled into a big armchair in front of a fireplace with my coffee. It was a mise-en-scene right out of any of the twenty Gamache books based in the Eastern Townships. I kept a sharp eye out for Louise Penny, who lives nearby. I sat there in blissful contemplation listening to half a dozen of Thomas’ messages I had kept on my phone, the audio version of questions he wanted to ponder. Serious questions, like: Why the aloneness of it all? What if our world is just chance and chaos?  What is a universal truth? What would your mother make of you now? Why is there so much fog around the moral high ground?  

The messages were hesitant, full of pauses, and half-starts. This was his way. He was thinking carefully of what he wanted to say. At the Three Pines bistro, no one paid attention to the odd fellow chuckling gleefully over his crumbling muffin. Had the Chief Inspector, and his wife, Reine-Marie, and maybe also his son-in-law, Jean-Guy, been sitting in a corner, working on a Surêté de Québec case, he would have taken me in with his deep-set, kind eyes and smiled. 

I would like to have Gamache take on some of our prickly questions.

Thinking about Thomas since he died, has he started a tilt back to slow thinking?  His gravitas had the weight of simple truth. He understood that life is about authenticity and connection.  What we become depends on what we learn at odd moments. Wisdom comes at unexpected thresholds.

We have had fast food and slow food, and now it may be time for slow thinking – the process of distilling lived experience into living wisdom. In a scary world of compulsive thinking and wonky decisions, slow thinking may be our salvation.  Take time, measure our beats, and distill something that helps make sense of the whirligig world around us.