It's Educational

Imagine sitting in the most important lecture of the most important class you'll ever take. The professor has fifty-three minutes or so to run through his exquisitely crafted speech, which runs over such a vast intellectual spectrum, end to end, that you can scarcely believe he ever managed to put it to words. He's talking fast. He's practically frothing at the mouth. You put your pen to paper and try to jot down the ideas, but they're too rapid, too diverse. You can't compress them. Nothing is less important and nothing is more important. You can't sum anything up. You try to write everything and end up writing nothing. All you can do is sit back and listen, pay as close attention as possible and hope you can remember it all.

But you can't. You'll forget it soon enough. Maybe you'll get drunk that night and obliterate the day. Maybe you'll have to read a book on something completely different and it will take hold of your attention. Maybe five minutes after it's over you'll run into someone on the street so fantastic you'll resolve never to think again. Or maybe it just so happens that another lecture will be happening right afterward, and it will seem just as important, just as fiercely fast, and you'll give up on all the stuff from the previous hour and grasp at the fleeting memory of the next.

As far as I can tell this frustrating compromise necessarily defines the life of anyone who thinks too much. For some people, every single moment is the most important moment. Every single thought is the most strikingly beautiful thing that's ever bounded through their brain.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are people out there who think just the right amount to fill up a few pages of a diary every night. Others maybe have just enough thoughts to capture them all in a novel or two. I've heard that a young poet who writes an epic is pouring everything he's got into one mess of a work, and if you really try, you can see the embryos of just about all the wonderful things he'll ever write lurking in those ill-formed lines, waiting to be born once the lad grows some patience or age slows him down. But I don't know about that.

All I know is that there are other people who aren't like that at all. They have so many thoughts that a constant stenographer couldn't capture them all. Constantly composing, constantly reordering, constantly creating, these people just run their minds like a drunkard runs his mouth and they don't stop even in sleep.

I'd like to think most of us are like that. It would make me feel better about myself.

But then: I don't know. I describe this to a medical professional and alarms go off. It's mania. It's psychosis. It's something and it's bad and it's scary and it's got to stop.

I'm not anti-psychiatry. I'm not a Scientologist. I don't think psychotherapy is enforcing psychic conformity. I think people who study the mind in order to help people with odd minds have nothing but the best intentions--though maybe with a small dose of voyeurism on the side.

But I also think they're prone to terrible misunderstandings. For all their studies they don't actually know very much. It's mostly guesswork.

So when I say I'm deep in thought at all times, they assume it's a problem. When I say my thoughts run away from me, they assume its a problem. When I say I can't sleep because my mind just keeps racing, they assume--well, all right. Maybe it's a bit of a problem.

But what's the alternative? Are there really people out there who habitually shift into autopilot for huge segments of the day? What the hell are they doing in those hours? Running on brainstem?

Is that normal? Is the human mind just so advanced and so incomprehensible even to itself that it has evolved failsafe switches that click on and off at random intervals just to give a break to whatever lobe our consciousness is hiding in? Is that really how it works? We're supposed to zone out every so often for our own good?

I don't like that thought at all. So my mind races. That's what minds do! Let it be.