It occurs to me that if anyone cared to know what I am really thinking there are ways to ferret that information out of my records. Take note, improbable biographers.
A person could ask me but that would initiate a complex series of interactions as my mind and the mind of my interlocutator negotiate a mutual language and point of view within which to exchange ideas. By the time thoughts flow freely the thoughts within my own mind might well have shifted. I might be pleased that you ask and the exchange might be fruitful but would the result answer the question of what I had been thinking? The uncertainty principal of humn interchange: In actual reality you can never know what a person was thinking before the inquiry; at best you may learn what that person is thinking now that you have asked.
Also you can only ask in the present moment. My thinking is far too ephemeral to inquire about yesterday, last week, or 1992.
We turn therefore to stable documents. These mini-essays about the actual reality I am observing are windows through which some of my thoughts will waft from time to time. The winds that drift here are accurate enough bearers of the mental perfume but they are limited: in time they are infrequent and irregular, in scope they select those topics which I expect to be interesting decades hence, in content the essay form demands pruning off those tangential tendrils reaching for other waters.
Evocative, no? If not well honed.
If you are my putative improbable biographer with access to all my personal archives -- ah, how unlikely you are! -- you have the ability to mine personal correspondence, copies of the letters and emails expressing my yearnings and amusement and inviting from the handful who make up the inner circle a word of confirmation, of affirmation, of information, of even perhaps transformation! Most of which missives could as well have been sent to the tar baby. No matter, your goal is to learn my thoughts and not the thoughts of the taciturn recipients of my epistles.
If beyond the implausibility of being my biographer and the improbability of having all my archives you have further been awarded a grant larger than the price of a single lunch then against all odds you have the unimaginable opportunity to step beyond what is merely stated and to infer a depth to my thinking by comparing multiple threads.
For example, a remark about the lack of rain in an email to a friend might suggest that I had looked out the window and observed cracks in the clay or a drooped flower. (One could retrieve the weather service observations for the day to ascertain that this comment was confactual and not an irony.) If the same point was made in another email and was worked into a reflective essay on the same day then you could infer that drought was a topic of deep concern.
Or that drought stood metaphorically in the place of a real concern not stated explicitly. This begs the question: What am I really thinking as I write this essay?