Episode summary
What does a ceiling fan have to do with the meaning of death? A late-night Wikipedia rabbit hole and a Yale philosophy course collide, leaving Tayvin with two expressions worth knowing: how to ask what's on someone's mind, and how to slowly make sense of an idea too big to grasp all at once.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. For those of you finding this podcast for the first time, I’m glad you’re here. I hope you choose to come back after this. For my returning listeners, it’s good to have you here with me again. Thank you for letting me be a part of your day.
What is philosophy? A question that is deceptively difficult to answer. If you’re not familiar with the word already, it originally comes from Greek. It can be broken down into two parts. Philo- means love, and -sophy means wisdom or knowledge. So a definition based on the etymology of the word would be: love of knowledge. While interesting, I don’t know if that’s the most useful definition. Another definition is that philosophy is what philosophers do. Easy to understand, but then we need a good definition of who a philosopher is, and that’s another question that could take a while to answer. A definition I once heard that I think is a good starting point is: philosophy is thinking really hard about things.
When you see someone thinking really hard, there’s something useful to say. That brings us to today’s phrase: a penny for your thoughts.
This is something you say to someone when you notice they look distracted, distant, or lost in thought. Maybe they’re staring out a window. Maybe they’ve gone quiet in the middle of a conversation. You can tell their mind is somewhere else entirely. So you say it, gently, as an invitation: a penny for your thoughts.
In American currency, the penny is the smallest unit and is practically a worthless amount of money. However, the term was originally coined back in early 16th century England. A common laborer might only make a couple of pennies a day back then, which would make paying a penny a not insignificant sum. The idea was that you are interested enough in knowing what was going on in someone else’s head that you’d happily pay a penny to have them share. It’s a nice way of asking: what are you thinking about?
Here’s a quick example: my wife noticed me staring quietly at the wall the other evening and asked, “A penny for your thoughts?” I told her I was wondering whether a person could die without really dying. She has gotten used to questions like this from me.
Keep that phrase in mind. By the end of today’s episode, you may find yourself wanting to ask me the same question. I have been thinking about quite a lot lately.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve found myself venturing into the study of philosophy. Much of that stems from my interest in religion. I’m a religious person. I go to church every week. I study my sacred texts, I pray, and I like to explore big religious questions about life, death, and everything in between. Many of the questions that are answered in church are also asked and studied by philosophers, often in different language and from a different starting point, but reaching toward the same deep mysteries. In my pursuit of more examples of how people have thought about some of these questions throughout history, I have found myself encountering philosophy.
A few months ago, I had the sudden desire and motivation to write a book. Almost like lightning out of the blue, a story jumped into my mind. I could see it play out like a movie. The characters, the setting, the central conflict, all of it arrived nearly complete. All I needed to do was find the right words. One of the core ideas in this book is about death. How do we deal with death? What is death? Is there a way someone might die without really dying? These are questions that my story wants to ask, but I don’t think I know enough yet to explore them well. It would be like trying to paint a portrait of someone I had never actually seen. So I decided to do a little searching to find resources to help me better understand these ideas.
Very quickly, I discovered a wealth of books, courses, lectures, TED talks, blog posts, and interviews about the subject. But the thing that really captured my attention was a Yale University course entitled Death. This course was recorded and published for free on YouTube by Yale. It is a philosophy course exploring the exact kinds of questions I felt I needed to better understand for my book idea to work. I still find it remarkable that a course from one of the most prestigious universities in the world is available for free to anyone curious enough to press play.
I haven’t finished the course yet. I’m taking it pretty slowly, pausing often to think and sometimes rewatching a lecture when my mind wanders. But I did start writing a short story version of the book idea I had. I’m almost done with a rough draft. Maybe someday I’ll share it with you.
The other night, I found a video on YouTube from Wikipedia’s own channel. It was called “What Happens If You Click the First Link on Every Wikipedia Article?” The answer, according to the video, is philosophy. Every Wikipedia page you might pull up eventually leads to philosophy, or so the video claims. I thought this was strange but interesting. So I tried it out myself.
It was already pretty late, so I lay down in bed with my wife and asked her to think of anything. We started with the Wikipedia page for a ceiling fan, and in about 10 clicks we found ourselves staring at the statue of The Thinker. That’s the main image on the philosophy page of Wikipedia. We tried again and again, starting with famous people, music, jobs, literature, and languages. Every single time, the same thing happened. Everything led back to philosophy. No one designed the website to do this. It is a completely unintentional feature of Wikipedia, but it is entirely consistent. Almost any page you start at eventually leads you to philosophy.
That’s also true in the real world. If you think hard enough and long enough about something, you’ll eventually find yourself doing philosophy.
Let’s talk about today’s second expression: to wrap your head around something.
Picture wrapping a piece of cloth or paper around an object. You move it all the way around, covering every side, until the whole shape is contained. In English, when we say we are trying to wrap our head around something, we mean we are trying to fully understand a concept that is large, complicated, or strange. Something that doesn’t fit neatly into our mind on the first attempt.
We use this phrase specifically for ideas that resist quick understanding. You don’t wrap your head around what time dinner is. You wrap your head around the size of the universe, or the concept of infinity, or, in my case lately, the philosophical question of what death actually is.
I have been trying to wrap my head around death for the past few months, ever since this book idea arrived in my mind. It is, frankly, a difficult thing to wrap your head around. Every time I think I’ve gotten a grip on one angle of the question, I notice another angle I hadn’t considered. The Yale course has been helpful, but it has also shown me how much more there is to understand than I originally thought.
And that brings me to something I find genuinely comforting about all of this. You are not supposed to wrap your head around something difficult on the first try. If you could, it probably wasn’t that difficult to begin with. The wrapping takes time. You go around the idea once, and you understand a little. You go around it again, from a different angle, and you understand a little more. Eventually, after enough attempts, the whole shape becomes familiar.
This is what the Wikipedia experiment showed me too, in its own strange way. Every subject, no matter how small or specific, eventually opens up into something larger if you keep clicking, keep asking, keep wrapping your head around it one layer at a time. A ceiling fan leads to philosophy. A simple definition leads to a difficult question about what makes someone a philosopher in the first place.
So here’s something to think about. What is something you’ve been trying to wrap your head around lately? It doesn’t have to be as big as death. It could be a new skill, a relationship, a decision you can’t quite make sense of yet. Whatever it is, give yourself permission to go around it more than once.
Our mind is like a muscle. The more we use it, the more we can use it. Don’t be afraid to think deeply. Even seemingly simple or obvious things have unexpected complexity to them. If you find that you’re having difficulty wrapping your head around a concept, slow down and just keep chipping away at it. One day, you’ll find that you understand more than you ever thought you’d be able to.
Maybe that’s why I like philosophy so much. It’s really just an endless collection of thoughts, deeply explored. And that’s worth sharing.
I love to think about unusual questions and learn new things. If you ever get the chance, give me a penny, and I’ll share what’s on my mind.
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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