Cooking Meat in Our Heads While Writing...
And going to another page of the drawing board of life.
How do we literally do nothing? Have you given that a try lately? Unless you are a Zen monk (and I have failed in any kind of Zen monk-ery), we are always doing something. With our minds. Or with our bodies, and sometimes our mind is doing something very different than our bodies which is signified by when we stub our toe, or cut ourselves with a kitchen knife or trip and fall on our face in public. Argue with me all you want, when a mishap occurs in our physical form it is because we were doing one action while mulling over a state of being-ness in our mind not connected at all.
I wish it would stop. I wish I could just be folding the towels and thinking about the towels. How soft they feel and how good I am at folding towels, and how wonderful there was a sale at Williams Sonoma for towels. And how upset I am whenever I wash towels they get weirdly grey and why do I even try to get white towels anymore. This thinking about towels could lead to a deeper story around towels, like “The woman folded the towel and saw in her reflection in the television that she had grown weary and haggard from putting up with her children’s biting demands. She put down the towel and decided she was booking a trip to Paris right then and there.” Instead, we fold towels and think about that stupid remark or whether we will be treated right on Friday, or where is that $5 coupon to the supermarket where we need to go once we overthink it for ten more hours, and whether we should really get that mole checked on our cheek. Here’s when we should be thinking about moles - when making an appointment with the doctor. Those weekend dinner plans should be made while staring into the Open Table app. Not all this conjecture that wastes time around the activity. We don’t need it. We can’t be helped when we are in a state of a split mind and body.
So if you took this mind fuckery away, you could possibly do nothing if that something was the action you chose to take. I know we label it as meditation but I am going beyond meditation. I mean, don’t do anything for like ten minutes. Just sit there without an agenda. We always have an agenda. Have to cook the meat in the fridge before it goes bad, and get those inserts for the heels that slip off. Did my daughter eat breakfast? She must be starving! Now we are worrying about our child dying of starvation while trying to fix the window screen and we almost sever our pinky finger. It’s not good. It’s dangerous, this lack of cohesion between the thought and the action.
I don’t know about you but I can’t live in the lunacy in my head that tries to tell me I will never figure anything out unless I overthink it for days. I have managed to survive all these years going to magical places and making friends and earning money, and I can guarantee it is not because I thought it through obsessively before. I eventually took action and that was an inevitability the minute I decided to make the plunge into that activity. Not because I clocked 437 thinking hours. Take writing for example. If you think you need to know what you are sitting down to write when you write fiction, you are mildly fucked. I mean, I think you should have a broad idea of what the premise is, and the theme, but wandering in that space open and aware is bliss if you can shut off the noises in your head that tell you that you are a useless writer if you don’t have the whole plot hammered out. Take left turns. Be surprised.
(Self help is the exception. You need more direction and a firm outline because you have to help someone by the end of 255 pages and people have that expectation and if you don’t do it, they will be very mad.)
Life is ripe for unexpected meetings, surprises, nuances and occurrences out of the blue but we block them with our consistent running dialogue about what we know, which is so limited in scope to what we always have access to. I will tell you a secret. I think if I sit down and just write something fictional, and I don’t know everything, or how about anything, I will still be sitting there thirty years later on my death bed staring at a blank page and a blinking cursor. I think there will be nothingness coming from me which is ridiculous because eventually we always write something because we want to write. And if we don’t want to write, then we are not sitting there and instead we are out boating or buying fondue pots at the thrift store for some retro party with our cool friends who are fine never having children.
I am serious by the way about cooking meat. Three times in the writing of this column I have thought about how I have to cook the meat in the fridge before it goes bad before I leave for the day. I am writing this and cooking meat in my head which makes no sense but it makes all the sense because that is what we do as humans.
It has to stop.
Here is how I feel when I am only thinking about the one action I am taking. I feel fantastic. Often, and I am just being honest, good sex will erase anything from your brain but the sex itself. But I know many of you think about buying floss while having sex if you have been with your partner for a long time. Stop thinking about dental products. Think about the sex. Same with writing. If you are writing and thinking about washing your car, stop. Clear your mind. Become vapid and vacant. I promise you won’t stay like that. You will still be interesting to your peers and friends. You won’t forget that you like art and wine. But then again, I hear confidence is silence and insecurity is loud, so maybe be the quietest one in the room and stop talking for a minute. Do nothing and think nothing around another person. That’s a trip. Have you tried that? I have not. Let me know how that works. I want to try it but I don’t want to be the first.