Zen

I was shaving my legs with a new razor the other day when, for a moment, I experienced the delight of the smoothness of the blades on my legs. With my monkey hair, a high quality razor starts wearing out after three or four shaves. I'm unwilling to spend $7 each week on razors, and, thus, I only get this feeling a few times every two months or so.

But my brain hijacked that moment. Just as soon as the good feeling occurred to me, I spoke "aloud" in my head, "Ah, that new razor feels so smooth. It's too bad it's going to be rough again so soon."

And from there I continued to articulate the thought bubbles that make up my stream of consciousness. "You're letting loss aversion take you from just enjoying the now again! You always do this. As soon as you realize something is nice, instead of enjoying it, you put it into words, and then you immediately realize or fear you will lose it. Then you might plan how to get the good thing back again, but when you do, you're only going to forget to enjoy it as you articulate the pleasure and then fear its loss again and plan for the future again in and endless cycle.

"And now you're continuing to ignore the good feeling of the razor by berating yourself for perpetuating this cycle, all still in words! You're not stopping even now because you seem to think your ideas are so interesting that you must encapsulate them into words in order to remember them and, perhaps, share them with others. 'Maybe I'll write a little essay or draw a little cartoon!' It's the same way you feel the need to take pictures of every fucking interesting or pretty thing you see, like it's your fucking job, as if if you don't, no one ever will. YOU DON'T HAVE TO DOCUMENT EVERYTHING! Sometimes you're the documentarian in life, and sometimes you're the audience. You need to push that line way over. Enjoy some moments in life without that compulsive need to document your thoughts keeping you toggling between the past and the future!"


This is what it's like in my head 99.9% of the time. It's as if I'm constantly on a couch, addressing the Freudian psychologist in my head with my stream of consciousness and then analyzing it in turn as the psychologist, which analysis in turn is treated as more stream to analyze. Ad infinitum.

The .1% of the time when it's not like that, when I am in the moment, occurs when I am either meditating successfully, losing myself in singing, or eating excellent sushi (occasionally other amazing foods work) if I close my eyes and am able to lose self-consciousness for a second at a time.

And why is it that, though meditating can be so pleasurable when I finally get my thoughts to quiet down and I feel the expansive peace of being one with the universe/the taming of my left brain, it's so hard to get myself to actually do it? Meditating does take time, of course, and it can be very frustrating to sit still for so long, not knowing whether or not you're actually going to get something out of the endeavor. Perhaps it's understandable, therefore, that I can almost never get around to doing it.

But why can't I learn to quiet my mind when I'm in the shower? When I go for a run? When I'm at work at Trader Joe's putting chips on a shelf?

It's not just those feelings of peace that I'm after. It's actually better thinking through less, for lack of a better word, thinking. Better thinking through less wording. Each of the thoughts in my head originates as one of these thought bubbles. The whole thing is encapsulated in that bubble already. There is no need to articulate it, except when talking or writing, yet I do it ad nauseum. It slows down my thinking and draws me out of the pleasure of thinking. Not only that but I believe it inhibits creativity and diversity in my thinking because I'm pulling my thoughts onto a track by wording them. Instead of listening, I'm talking. Everyone who knows me knows I have a bad habit of this in conversation, but I also have this habit in my own internal conversations.

What quieting the left brain can feel like. I hope I don't have to have a stroke to learn this lesson.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about an experience the narrator goes through that seems remarkably like the left hemisphere stroke Jill Bolte Taylor experienced. In Zen, the narrator was hospitalized for losing his mind.

And yet my $75 meditation mat sits there, gathering dust and cat hair from its only user.