The brain is always working, chugging away, looking for problems to solve, things to worry about, sensory input to process, and actions to take. It doesn’t rest. Remarkable brain. I applaud you, brain.
Yesterday, I was talking to an accomplished friend who is making a career change after some health setbacks and is feeling like a failure because everything hasn’t fallen into place yet. My friend seems to like it when I’m blunt, so I said, “That’s a little grandiose, isn’t it?” and they took my point; they seemed calmer once we finished our conversation, though when I hung up, honestly, I myself was less calm. I worried I had been rude. I reflected on my own failures and my successes.
The idea of “failure” is grandiose in itself. It implies that you can be a “success.” I have failed miserably, and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, and both states were incredibly temporary. That doesn’t stop the brain from fearing the one and desiring the other, or from fixating on both.
I reassured myself by reminding myself that humanity itself is a brief and temporary phenomenon in a universe that will end at some point.
Other things that happened yesterday, some of them successes and some not: I asked my doctor for a referral to an ophthalmologist. A family member complained to me about something, and I listened and sympathized instead of doing what I felt like, which was crying. The Phillies swept the Giants, with Alec Bohm hitting a lovely sacrifice fly to win the game after a long drought and after a legal dispute with his parents over his money. I bought cookies at Whole Foods and made dinner, a tofu bolognese I feed the family regularly, but I am not really much of a cook, and I worry that they say it’s good just to make me feel better. I put the trash out, including something I forgot to put in the recycling last week, but not the other thing I forgot to put out last week, and I cleaned the kitchen. I wrote the 311th blog post in my planned post-a-day project for this year. I cleaned out the cat litter pan, did a laundry, did two dishwasher loads, and took a nap in my recliner. Several fire engines roared past my street in the evening, their sirens blaring, but they weren’t going to my block after all. I dreamed I was teaching in the middle school I attended as a kid, and had to go to the bathroom, but the stalls were all wide open and the toilets were filthy. I worked a little bit on my book, the one I’ve been working on for a couple of years, the one that doesn’t make any sense. The cat nagged me for food all day, and I worried that he doesn’t love me. That his whole personality is food and chin scratching. That my whole personality is food and sleep.
All of these things are stomping around in my brain like an upstairs neighbor who is practicing their tap-dancing, and to my brain, they are all equally present and clamoring for my attention. Thank you so much, brain. That’s enough. You can shut up now.
Because the only thing that is real is the sun on the side of my face, and the fact that as usual, I am wearing smudged glasses I can’t be bothered to clean, because I’ll just stick them on top of my head again. The only sounds are my fingers fluttering on the keyboard, cars whispering past in the street, and those birds chirping outside who sure do have opinions.
They tell me the Earth revolves around the Sun while rotating at an angle, and that the angle of the Earth’s axis is responsible for the seasons, but all I know for sure is that the sun feels pretty nice, though it has already moved from my cheek to my chin while I wrote this.
That’s all there is. The brain is making up everything else, telling stories about the past and the future, conjuring up bad things and good things as if they were right in front of me. Darn. The sun has moved to my arm and the edge of the desk since I wrote the last paragraph.