Running around in circles

  Running around in circles*  

The last time I saw Bob,** the amateur cognitive-behavioral therapist guy (because anybody can do this, right?) : “Don’t brood,” he said.

 

But brooding, it occurs to me four-and-a-half years later, doesn’t have to be grave and serious and sad as Bob seemed to think it must. Brooding can be a neutral term as much as thinking is. In this way of thinking, thinking would be clear, and if thinking need not be linear, it would always be able to retrace its steps. Brooding, however, is never linear; it cannot walk a straight line. It is drunk, staggering, wandering, it is soon lost if not lost to begin with.
     These are its advantages. It doesn’t look where it’s going, keeping in its head always

a map of where it’s been. It wanders about where it is. And confused, it stops and looks around and wonders, “Wait a minute. How did I get here?” Not that that will ever be clear. Nor will “And where am I going?” Even if the answer is as definite as “Home. To bed,” how to find the way there is extremely unlikely to be certain. Which home? Whose bed?
     Now, there are grave drunks, there are sad drunks, there are sentimental drunks. There are also light-hearted drunks, there are smiling, unsentimental drunks. There are those that cry in their beer, and there are those that laugh when they slip and pratfall in their own vomit. There are careful-with-what-they-say drunks — “Sshhh!” —  and there are Irish drunks, whose tongues are loosed to babble beyond understanding.
     This is all to say that there are different ways of brooding. We should cultivate them. And distractedness — we should cultivate that, too. Sometimes it is the only way forward. Or sideward.
     Time wants us to think it is linear. But it ain’t necessarily. Thought may be linear, but not every good way of mushing things around in your brain is.

 03.08.21

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   * like a chicken with its head cut off, a Rhode Island Red. ***Or a spoonbill, maybe a spoonbill, a roseate spoonbill.

 ** That was right after this.