This easiest thing to do is not think about it.
You go about your day, eatsleepbreathe, function in all the necessary capacities. Surround yourself with people because it takes away all the pressure of even having to think at all. Go to class, go to meetings, plug in the iPod, study, focus, play video games, make a to-do list, anything that separates you from your mind, you from your thoughts, stops you from having even a second of time to yourself to think about whatever you can, because that’s when it’s the worst.
The fact is, doing this is easier now than it ever has been, and you couldn’t be more grateful for it. These days, with everything so instant, so immediate, so RIGHT-NOW-IN-140-CHARACTERS, so AT-YOUR-FINGERTIPS, everybody and everything locked in a maniacal race against time that resets and continues in an uneasy cadence and permeates every single aspect of society [and all those other aspects that you didn’t even know or want to know existed], every person jockeying for position on a course that only has room for a limited number – the loudest, the meanest, the biggest bully – of credible witnesses; these days, it’s easy to escape from your own thoughts. To slip out when your subconscious isn’t looking. Drown yourself, saturate yourself in everything your immediate surroundings have to offer these days, and you won’t come up for days [if you come up at all], gasping for breath just like when you were a mischievous kid with no responsibilities and you tried to hold your breath for half a second too long.
The fact is, so many people do this every day that no one would even question you. Everyone is so caught up in their own escape, you can get lost in the wavepool of random consciousness that invades the Twitterverse (do people think in under 140 characters? Account for spaces and punctuation?), the Facebook news feed, the blogosphere [each with its own pretty, neatly packaged name, each with its own “user-friendly” and unique way of capturing your mind and wringing its eager neck] and never come out. These days, you’re called trendy. Hip. With it. Caught up with the times. Tech-savvy. Ahead of the curve. Modern. Futuristic. Open-minded [ha!].
The fact is, none of these are symptoms of an open mind. The fact is, an open mind is not what you’re craving. The fact is, hard as you try, as much as you wish, you can’t close your mind off from yourself forever.
You wake up every day, just you and your thoughts, as pure as Mother Theresa could have possibly imagined it. Shower/shave/change, no breakfast, stumble out the door and all you’ve had to think about today was everything you tried to get away from yesterday. Mornings are the worst, leaving you a blank slate ready to absorb the attacks of a thought process that won’t get the hint. Headphones in, walk to class [is any song worth singing if it doesn’t help?], but when you get there it’s a beautiful, clean, pure, hour-and-a-half all to yourself to think, to write, to dream, to imagine being anywhere other than where you are, and the thought creeps back in before you can convince yourself that calculus actually makes sense. That archaeology will ever mean anything to you. That writing a formulaic philosophy paper can be innovative and original. That management classes aren’t just teaching you to be heartless, but demanding your soul along with it.
Just when you think you are as busy as you possibly could be, that you couldn’t fit another idea into your head, it comes back. You can’t think selectively, not in the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the night [which overlap and interchange faster than you can wrap your head around, if you ever took those hours and tried].
Have you ever wanted to just stop thinking? Lobotomize. Check out. Take it or leave it, shut down without a restart option, burn and burn until you can’t go on any longer. Would be easier, yes, to not care, to not think, to let things slide off you like they don’t mean a thing. Waterproof, but every-thing proof. Impervious.
“Once I leave work every day, I want to stop thinking for the day,” your mother said nonchalantly. She was talking over NPR’s background static as you drove through the city listening to the mountains of issues facing multi-cultural couples in Iraq, how Shiites and Sunnis would rather cast out a child for inter-marriage rather than support the union. How religious and cultural affiliation can mean more than the closest family bond. How, if these people could, they would completely erase the memory of their child who married someone who was unacceptable. How these families wished they could stop thinking about it, but they can’t.
“But momma,” you respond almost incredulously, knowing that it can’t have been what she meant. “There’re so many things in the world to think about.”
If everyone had that many things in their head, they would surely snap like the rubber band whizzing at your left eye from across the room. You can’t turn it off, even as you try every second of every day to overexpose yourself to the world. With all these things to think about, it must be easy to shut out anything you don’t want to hear. Got to be. It’s the simplest thing, just going about your day as if nothing ever happened. Every day, it’s so simple to ignore everything you want to. A peace of mind.
The hardest thing to do is not think about it.
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