A Practical Example of Reasoning

2015-01-16

In working with this theme of reasoning I asked some of the online group participants to take up the challenge of doing two or three reasoning processes this week, and reporting on their experiences. What they were asked to do was this:

TASK FOR THE WEEK:

… “to individually go through a process of reasoning two or three times this week to gain some familiarity with this method, and then post our experiences on our individual blogs. There are roughly four simple steps to this task, and it might help us to blog them in this order:

1.     Here's my situation.
2.     Here's my reasoning process
3.     Here's the outcome to my reasoning process
4.     Here's what I learned, observed, discovered, thought about, had a question about, from all of this. “

We use an approach to understanding how things ‘work’ called Systematics, and in relation to the process of reasoning the tetrad can be quite useful.  So the process outlined above can be represented by a tetrad as follows:

As often happens, I realized that I had used this method just a few days ago without even thinking about it as a method. Using the outline shown above…

My situation was observing that in the evening I’ve been in the habit of having a glass of wine. Lately however, one glass has led to two, and then to three, and so on. These were quite tiny glasses, drunk over a long period of time, so I wasn’t even getting tipsy let alone drunk, but still it seemed to me that the habit was creeping up a bit too much.

My reasoning process was to set aside any “shoulds” or “intentions” and to simply ask the question, “Why is this happening?”. The ‘answer’ that came back was a need for physical stimulation. I’m mostly sitting in front of a computer in the evening. Lately it’s been getting colder, and I realized that it wasn’t wine that I wanted, but rather something hot with physical sensations that could go some way toward balancing the lack of physical activity while sitting in front of a keyboard hour after hour.

The outcome was that I’ve switched over to hot tea and other hot drinks. Without even trying, I noticed that last night was the first time I had a glass of wine in about a week. And even then it was for enjoyment of the wine itself rather than acting as a physical distraction. 

I learned (re-discovered) several things that have come up in the past. One is that hours and hours in front of a computer aren’t especially good for me, and that I need to do a reasoning process in that area. I also observed a willful ignoring of the body’s condition (lack of movement, aches, poor posture, etc.) in order to stay focused on the computer. This willful ignorance (separate from the merits of hours in front of a computer) also needs some serious consideration. I also saw how easy and beneficial a reasoning process is, and how seldom I employ this method in relation to how often it could easily be used.

One final note:  All this might appear to be an obvious and easy change to make... and indeed it was... but only after I had reasoned it out. Before that, the habitual routine was just mindlessly going on and on through momentum, week after week.