1) Notice, with any senses that you can muster, things and realities great and small, within you and outside you, things and realities that may give you pause for wonder, inspire you or challenge you, raise questions or even conflict within you. (If you aren't noticing anything surprising, try changing your scenery or sources of information.)

ABCs of Noticing: A. Start the day observing the season's weather conditions, flora, and fauna -- because they are always changing. You may record your observations in a journal and/or try using apps like the Globe Observer or Inaturalist. B. Take a walk in the garden, woods, or around the block, without a destination, necessarily, except to expect that something will catch your attention -- write about and include pictures if helps you. C. Read an article or book, and write brief reflections on your readings as you go.

2) Connect your observations with others to visualize patterns, equations, and pathways in multiple contexts and timeframes. Review all the research related to your subject and add to your collections along different timeframes. Your various collections become the "lenses" that help bring a problem or question into focus in unique ways to help you see how you may use your observation.

3) Select the best approach, utilizing a specific "lens" to understand, or approach the topic or problem you identified and explain your reasoning, or rationale, for selecting that over the others.

For example: You may choose a 10 month timeframe from which to better understand a particular virus rather than a thousand year timeframe, given that most of the mutations have occurred recently. Ten month, ten year, ten decade, and ten century perspectives can each bring completely different things into focus to answer completely different questions, or provide very different answers for the same question.)

4) Predict, or hypothesize how your approach to a question or problem can be proven to be effective or true in some way. This prediction or theory could become your thesis in an essay, and everything that brought you to this hypothesis, part of your introduction.

5) Construct a series of related examples with specific evidence to test your theory, or thesis.

6) Critique the results of your analysis of evidence, using unflinching hindsight to identify its strengths and weaknesses, as conclusively as you can.

7) Refine your thinking to make an improved course for future action, including new goals, knowing that circumstances will continue to change.