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The few who inherit the ability to think, to utilise our unique disposition to its highest capacity, are more often cursed than blessed. To be able to do without thinking, is to be average and uninspired, to turn the wheel without reinventing it.

To think without the ability to do is possibly the greatest suffering to be bestowed upon an individual. Overrun with ideas, infinite possibilities chained together in an astral web of connected equations. An observer, collecting, analysing data. Constructing pathways to enlightenment without ever paving the road. It is torture to witness the deaths of thoughts so inexplicably potent, so original and transformative but destined to crumble amidst the shortcomings of my own nature.

I can see the footholds all the way to the summit of the vast mountain of knowledge I have accumulated, but lack the strength to move my limbs. If a machine has a power source then where is mine? How do I shut off these perpetual computations? Numbing the mind with excessive consumption, a gateway to unconsciousness: temporary cures to an illness born from twisted potential. Would I rather be sentenced to dragging a boulder for all eternity, or to think about doing so for as long as my mortality permits?

To neither think nor do is to be inanimate. Which must mean that the key to the materialisation of meaningful matter, the ability to turn nothing into something, to make one from zero, is to be able to withstand the overwhelming, excruciating burdens of ‘thinking’ without sacrificing the grounded discipline, motivation and persistence required for ‘doing’.