I'd like to think that thinking for yourself has the highest upside when it comes to understanding your direct experience with reality.
When you have a direct experience such as a setback against pushing forward towards your goals or even just a strange feeling, as in having those "something wrong is about to happen" type of feeling, there's real value in sitting with it first before immediately seeking outside interpretation.
I can't make sense of much of the reasoning behind when you have an experience and then go ask someone else to interpret or decode for you the experience that you just had, or better yet, tell you what it means (as if they were there).
Of course, within reasonable cases like medical symptoms or technical problems you've never encountered, you have to ask for help.
But even then, this is more so for gathering information and perspective than getting someone to tell you how you should feel about it or what it means for your life.
Basically, immediately outsourcing your interpretation of your own experiences generally feels like giving away your own authority over your life.
What better way is there to just sit and reflect, maybe let the experience work on you, so to speak, doing its own quiet thing in the background while you go about your day?
Here and now
Of course, there's also an element of wanting to have all the answers right here and now as a sort of shield against uncertainty or whatever discomfort the unknown wears at the time.
It becomes obvious with time and experience that when all is said and done, everyone is just figuring it out. Be it those who are ahead of us and those we are ahead of. This itself is a realization that I try to retain beyond just accepting that no one has it all figured out.
Sometimes, or arguably most times, we unnecessarily take life too seriously and usually for the wrong reasons.
assign deep meaning to things that are just noise, just life happening. The weight we carry often isn't the weight of actual problems but the weight of our interpretations or rather stories about what things mean. And those stories are written no other than ourselves even when we can all pretend we don't.
Seeking chaos as much as I can but never at the expense of my peace.
Back to balance
In a way, constantly seeking external validation or interpretation makes us sitting ducks, both vulnerable and stationary, waiting for some external force to tell us when it's safe to move or what direction to fly.
The human experience does sometimes come with a lot of upside down type of confusion. Down is up, up is down. At least for awhile, until whatever force is in charge of bringing things back to balance does its work.
Sometimes, that force is just time.
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Seeking interpretations from others often makes things worse and confuses me even more, at least in my experience. So like you said, it's better to sit it out first and observe how it goes.
Right, I think this is a better strategy most of the time, let the meaning or whatever the interpretation is reveal itself to us. That's how wisdom is built and reinforced too.
Thanks for stopping by :)