I think my brain might be broken. Or maybe it is so filled with data that is useless and should be removed. Or it is merely congested… but I am unable to delete at will.
If that urban myth is true… we only use 10 percent of our brains… I couldn’t handle using 20 percent unless it would teach me how to categorize and process all the new information bouncing around in there that is trying to find a place to stick… daily… hourly… hell every couple of seconds.
You know what I’m talking about… That spiderweb effect of connected bubbles in your brain or mapping, if you like that language better, where you try to draw lines between patterns that make some sense about your work project or your taxes or the way to plan to organize, really, finally, the garage/laundry room/study/spare bedroom.
This often sends me to Staples or someplace like it, even an online version, where I think buying folders and markers and sticky notes will be my salvation to my bills/book project/long range planning document… for my life.
We simply have access to too much information, too many brands, too many choices on what to buy, watch, read, eat, recreate, escape to. How to… fix our diet, flat tire, relationship, rodents in the yard.
I have lost my ability to be idle, to try to put my brain in neutral and see where it takes me. My default positions for this used to be folding laundry, or filling the bird feeders, or just driving on country roads. But the monkey chatter in my brain is too loud. Now when I fold laundry my inner critic says things like, “why do you still have this turtleneck? It is faded and maybe a decade old.” Or … “good thing you live alone — those pajamas are threadbare and shapeless and not even cool enough to be funky, just tired.” These days, even filling the bird feeders starts bird chatter in my head.” That tree needs trimming… the porch is sagging. Should you really make the effort to try and plant a garden again this year? How many years has it been since you painted the house?”
A very long time ago, when I ran to clear my head, a rhythm would start “this step, this block, this neighborhood.” Now when I just walk, I hear my inner voice taking a kind of inventory of who used to live that in house, it was just one story and it has now been leveled and rebuilt and something very modern is in its place, out of place. Whatever happened to that family who split apart, whose children grew up and moved away. Those children who played with my children, who all ate treats together, in my kitchen.
I want to think more, much more, and yet I am conditioned to be lazy or at least expedient. So when the March madness moon dances in my bedroom in the dark of the night and I sit up wide awake that song pops into my mind, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” And I try to remember, did Kris Kristofferson write that? Or Rita Coolidge? Was it on that album they did together? Were they married then, still? And instead making my brain work and search dark dusty corners and remember how I used to play my Kris and Rita album over and over and over during that break-up period and how silly that relationship looks in hindsight and how it colored so many years of my life and relationships for decades after, instead, I do what most folks do these days. I Googled it. And after too many minutes spent with the computer light fighting with the moonlight, I find zero references that either Kris or Rita ever recorded the Jimmy Webb song. But Joe Cocker did and Josh Groban did, decades later, and a list of other folks. And I learn that before Kris married Rita his second wife, he dated Janis Joplin and Barbra Streisand. And then I wonder if all my memories, from decades ago, are files that are corroded by time. Did Kris perform it years ago on stage here in Park City with his third wife, Lisa, standing in the wings? Is that possible? My brain has no independent confirmation.
I remember there were days when I was bored. I would listen to music and putter inside and tinker outside, hands in dirt and not even know I was thinking/working out a knotty problem. It would reveal itself like a green shoot buried under dried leaves. Always a surprise and yet not entirely unknown.
I miss those days of expanse of time where jumbled thoughts would knock against one another and then rearrange themselves like some crazy cartoon and become something altogether new.
I am not complaining here. A recent Huffington Post article talked about the sickness of “busyness” and suggested replacing the language with “fullness.” And I immediately identified. Busy starts to suggest the flapping wings of Chicken Little, “the sky is falling!” While fullness, fullness looks more like a beehive where there is much buzzing activity but it is productive and rich. And full.
I need to separate the urgent and immediate and give them each space in my tiny, crowded brain. I need to remember that I don’t always remember facts but prefer sometimes watercolored memories. I will plan for a long walk this weekend when daylight saving time gives me a longer, lighter day and the moon, a longer, brighter night. I will try to seek some quiet amid the fullness of my life, this very Sunday in the Park…
Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.