I know the internet affects the way my mind works. I guess I tend to think that it's more the pyroluria-affected ADHD-type symptoms that drive my erratic, distracted way of working where, like today, I am flittering backwards and forwards between different subjects, working on 10 things at once.
But then I've just been reminded how the internet makes it so much worse for me. And maybe it's affecting my focus just as much or maybe even more than the physical issues I have. I just before read a quote in this article from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. The linear Western mind of the past 500 years is moving to make way for something else that likes its information “in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the faster, the better”.
That must be why I have, as we speak, 25 different tabs open on my browser. Twenty-five. That's ridiculous. One is for an ad on Gumtree that I've had pinned but then forgotten about from sometime last week, that is so old that there's a 404 error on it when I click on it and it says, "Sorry, that page no longer exists." There's a YouTube clip for chemtrails and an interview podcast with two writers I've been meaning to watch for about a week as well. There's the Telegraph UK article I linked to above that was talking about online distractions, which was part of some research I was doing for a Weekend Notes article I wrote last week about curbing your online distractions (you will understand now why I needed to write that article :) There are eight open pages about WordPress and/or clip arts for logos I'm designing for a blog I'm slowly beginning to put together for my partner. There are two pages relating to a website I'm interested in writing for in the future. There are six pages relating to articles I'm in the process of writing for Weekend Notes. There is a page from Sarah's Early Women Masters' site I'm reading about Emily Dickinson. There is a site about proofreading services that I'm reading for research for future work prospects. There's an article from The Daily Good. And finally there's a pizza menu for tonight's dinner. There's this blog post I'm writing right now, which I started after reading bits and pieces of those articles I'm meant to be in the middle of writing for Weekend Notes.
Wow. That's all very productive, isn't it! It makes me sound like a powerhouse of working energy. And I guess today I am. But it's also just bloody ridiculous, and seriously, I am now just a tad exhausted after writing that above paragraph. It's a cerrrazy way to work. But it's how I work these days, now that computers and browsers have changed so that you can hibernate the 'puter without turning it off and shutting all your programs down. Now, we our internet surfing experience is an ongoing one, unlike the days when everything needed to be closed and turned off.
Part of me enjoys working this way. It sure keeps things interesting. But that's a bit disturbing when I think of how the internet is shaping my mind. And the silly part about it is that I often have this yearning to get all of those tabs closed so that I can have that lovely, fresh the feeling of only having one tab open at a time. But who works like that these days? Not very many people, surely.
Nicholas Carr's observation that the internet is producing people with a broad knowledge that is incredibly shallow is disturbing, wouldn't you say?. I find it so. Especially as a writer, desiring to write stuff that is compelling and keeps people interested. But how do you do that? I mean, using myself as a guinea pig, I don't treat other people's words with the same respect. I flit back to them, reading in chunks.
I think though that part of what fuels this ridiculous incidence of having 25 tabs open at once is something that is the opposite to what Carr is saying. My desire is to understand to the nth degree the very bottom of every subject I study, and sometimes that makes me flick away from one subject to have a breather. It's just that then I have a breather in another subject. And even writing that I know it's a little weird and silly because doing that fuels the very issue I have in the first place, that of focus and attention. And so the snake comes round and bites its own tail.
What a complex and changing world, eh? But I tend to think that the web is not all doom and gloom in terms of changing the way we think. I think that one thing the net is doing is that it is making us realise how connected the world is. (And like my partner just said, paradoxically it's happening via the very technology that is disconnecting everybody from each while they sit in the same room, hooked into their devices). Still, despite that paradox, I think maybe it is helping in the ongoing process that is the Western mind learning to reconnect to knowledge that the indigenous mind possess automatically, being hooked into the world and each other. That connection is what humans need - a worldview of Oneness that maybe we will be able to find our way back to, where we will learn to look after the earth once more.
I hope so, anyway :)
Showing posts with label mind monkeys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mind monkeys. Show all posts
I must say that I am a little disappointed that I haven't managed to blog every
day of the NaBloPoMo challenge. My inner perfectionist and pleaser is nervous. My inner relaxed chilled out mystic says, meh, I tried my hardest, so who really gives a shit ultimately anyway?
Some of those days I missed out were health-related. But yesterday's I lay squarely at the feet of my dog ... and my job. Or, to be more accurate, at the attention deficit issues I face when doing my job. These two things collided in the middle of Tuesday night that made for a slightly hellish Wednesday in terms of bushy tailness.
Do your thoughts jump around or glide? NaBloPoMo asks me today. Well, when it comes to my job, they tend to Duracell bunny. I work from home doing transcription work, which I am excellently good at and which pays pretty well, but which (a) I hate and (b) is boring beyond belief and (c) feeds right into those attention deficits. I am never any more attentionally challenged than when I am on the internet, where I'm about as successful at keeping only one webpage open at a time as I am at eating only one row of confectionery masquerading as chocolate.
On Tuesday I did a job that ended up taking a whole lot more time than I could have anticipated (this is a regular occurrence. Two hours of daily audio can be quite different to assess in terms of how long it's going to take to get done). Add to that the fact that I'm not so great at time management. Living under the threat of a clock is difficult at the best of times. And working from home gives a certain sort of flexibility so that going out for a walk when it is still daylight in the middle of winter is much better use of my time than sitting on my numb bum typing interviews conducted by governmental bureaucratic cogs to employeeish bureaucratic cogs.
All of this translated out to me finishing work at about 2.30 on Wednesday morning.
Which is insane by anybody's reckoning. I am embarrassed to admit that I took so long to complete the day's work. Butsome days every single day I struggle with concentration. Which means flicking backwards and forwards between the job that pays the bills and reading much more interesting fare on the interwebs. I also write blog posts and submit writing to editors when I should be working as well. It stops me from impaling myself on sharp objects.
(Actually, Tuesday was a record in terms of submitting a piece and having it rejected. Writers get used to submitting something and not hearing back for months on end. It's unavoidable but that doesn't make it not rude. This one though - I submitted it to The Monthly at 1.31 pm and at 3.51 pm had another rejection email to add to the mix. Albeit one which said it was "original". I'll take encouragement, even while it's nestled in the midst of rejection, whenever I can get it).
So because I felt so shite yesterday, I thought the best way to utilise what was left of the morning was to watch some David Attenborough. His stuff is like balm to my inner raw baby's bum. Even an episode about insects, which sounds dangerously boring to watch when tired, was fascinating. I watched a bunch of ants climbing up blades of grass and chewing their way through the blade, and then falling to the ground with their prize and take it back to the nest, along with all the other ants doing the same thing (hilarious). Ants can't digest grass. What they are doing is taking it back to the nest to feed to the fungus that they share their housing with. The fungus lurves the grass. And the ants lurve the fungus. A win-win situation).
I was also happy and completely unsurprised to see a crow in this episode. He was having his heels nipped by irate insects until he went away. And so the universe delivering me crow/raven symbolism continues.
So anyway, where was I up to? Oh yes, that's right. The dog. I haven't yet got to the dog.
The dog has taken to getting up in the middle of the night and barking. By the time I got to bed on Tuesday night I managed to get about 30 minutes before he started. Got up, let him out, went back to bed. Fifteen minutes later he was barking again, and this time Anthony got up. Rinse and repeat. And then rinse and repeat. Eventually, the dog, in his senility (he does not get entitled to a name when he is in the doghouse) managed to settle down to sleep, and so did I. And even though I managed to sleep for somewhere between four and five hours, I still felt like I'd drunk a row of Sambuca shots before I'd gone to sleep. And hence no blog post.
So. Do my thoughts jump around or glide? Well, see how I've jumped around in this post? This feels really structured compared to the thoughts that slid past the void and came out of my mind to form the words of this post. They were pretty much all over the joint. And I write much more cohesively than I talk. Which is a concern.
But my thoughts really are all cohesive. It's just that so often I seem to be a big picture thinker, and so while one thought may seemingly jump from one subject to the next, from within my head they're all part of the same fabric, all linked in with each other. It's just that sometimes it's a bloody big piece of fabric, and those words have to traverse the Chasm of Cottonness to come out of my mouth. And in the meantime there are about 16 other thoughts that all link to the first thought I've had, and they want to speak too because it's all linked, and I simply must make some sort of an effort to try to define what's in my head, even though I am always, and constantly, disappointed that what is in my head to say is never, ever, ever anything quite like what is spoken or blogged out into solidity :)
And this is why I'm off to do some yoga. Because yoga helps take me to the space where my central nervous system takes a deep breathe and from there, even I get to sometimes experience the beauty of a mind where the thoughts glide through like an ice skater and out the other side :)
Some of those days I missed out were health-related. But yesterday's I lay squarely at the feet of my dog ... and my job. Or, to be more accurate, at the attention deficit issues I face when doing my job. These two things collided in the middle of Tuesday night that made for a slightly hellish Wednesday in terms of bushy tailness.
Do your thoughts jump around or glide? NaBloPoMo asks me today. Well, when it comes to my job, they tend to Duracell bunny. I work from home doing transcription work, which I am excellently good at and which pays pretty well, but which (a) I hate and (b) is boring beyond belief and (c) feeds right into those attention deficits. I am never any more attentionally challenged than when I am on the internet, where I'm about as successful at keeping only one webpage open at a time as I am at eating only one row of confectionery masquerading as chocolate.
On Tuesday I did a job that ended up taking a whole lot more time than I could have anticipated (this is a regular occurrence. Two hours of daily audio can be quite different to assess in terms of how long it's going to take to get done). Add to that the fact that I'm not so great at time management. Living under the threat of a clock is difficult at the best of times. And working from home gives a certain sort of flexibility so that going out for a walk when it is still daylight in the middle of winter is much better use of my time than sitting on my numb bum typing interviews conducted by governmental bureaucratic cogs to employeeish bureaucratic cogs.
All of this translated out to me finishing work at about 2.30 on Wednesday morning.
Which is insane by anybody's reckoning. I am embarrassed to admit that I took so long to complete the day's work. But
(Actually, Tuesday was a record in terms of submitting a piece and having it rejected. Writers get used to submitting something and not hearing back for months on end. It's unavoidable but that doesn't make it not rude. This one though - I submitted it to The Monthly at 1.31 pm and at 3.51 pm had another rejection email to add to the mix. Albeit one which said it was "original". I'll take encouragement, even while it's nestled in the midst of rejection, whenever I can get it).
So because I felt so shite yesterday, I thought the best way to utilise what was left of the morning was to watch some David Attenborough. His stuff is like balm to my inner raw baby's bum. Even an episode about insects, which sounds dangerously boring to watch when tired, was fascinating. I watched a bunch of ants climbing up blades of grass and chewing their way through the blade, and then falling to the ground with their prize and take it back to the nest, along with all the other ants doing the same thing (hilarious). Ants can't digest grass. What they are doing is taking it back to the nest to feed to the fungus that they share their housing with. The fungus lurves the grass. And the ants lurve the fungus. A win-win situation).
I was also happy and completely unsurprised to see a crow in this episode. He was having his heels nipped by irate insects until he went away. And so the universe delivering me crow/raven symbolism continues.
So anyway, where was I up to? Oh yes, that's right. The dog. I haven't yet got to the dog.
The dog has taken to getting up in the middle of the night and barking. By the time I got to bed on Tuesday night I managed to get about 30 minutes before he started. Got up, let him out, went back to bed. Fifteen minutes later he was barking again, and this time Anthony got up. Rinse and repeat. And then rinse and repeat. Eventually, the dog, in his senility (he does not get entitled to a name when he is in the doghouse) managed to settle down to sleep, and so did I. And even though I managed to sleep for somewhere between four and five hours, I still felt like I'd drunk a row of Sambuca shots before I'd gone to sleep. And hence no blog post.
So. Do my thoughts jump around or glide? Well, see how I've jumped around in this post? This feels really structured compared to the thoughts that slid past the void and came out of my mind to form the words of this post. They were pretty much all over the joint. And I write much more cohesively than I talk. Which is a concern.
But my thoughts really are all cohesive. It's just that so often I seem to be a big picture thinker, and so while one thought may seemingly jump from one subject to the next, from within my head they're all part of the same fabric, all linked in with each other. It's just that sometimes it's a bloody big piece of fabric, and those words have to traverse the Chasm of Cottonness to come out of my mouth. And in the meantime there are about 16 other thoughts that all link to the first thought I've had, and they want to speak too because it's all linked, and I simply must make some sort of an effort to try to define what's in my head, even though I am always, and constantly, disappointed that what is in my head to say is never, ever, ever anything quite like what is spoken or blogged out into solidity :)
And this is why I'm off to do some yoga. Because yoga helps take me to the space where my central nervous system takes a deep breathe and from there, even I get to sometimes experience the beauty of a mind where the thoughts glide through like an ice skater and out the other side :)
It's my pottery class tonight and I'm feeling like I don't want to do it. Which is really just a cover up for the fact that I'm feeling nervous and excited about it. I can't fool myself :)
I keep expecting bad things are gonna come out of the clay, deep, dark secrets that foretell doom and gloom. Nothing I have made from clay has done that. Last week at art therapy I began moulding clay with my intellect switched off. What came out was half a nut, cut in half. The middle of a nut is called a kernel. At the same time I kept seeing this shape as also being like a piece of furniture in some weird way. I kept imagining a figure reclining on it and something to do with seeds. Then it came to me later that night - a seedbed. This is a kernel and a seedbed and all these metaphors and alliterations and playful word puns come out effortlessly of the deeper, darker, excitinger, mysteriouser part of me, not the boring, stupid, pain in the arse that often controls my mind :)
She's doing it this morning. She's thinking that it's all her. I want to go on a word fast sometime soon where for 24 hours the only words allowed out of my mouth or my keyboard are poetry or metaphor or song :) I'm so tired of hearing myself think! But then the deeper, more mysteriouser part speaks and I am left gobsmacked again at how far I extend beyond consumer lines and familial lines and social networking lines and beyond my own conscious lines. And this is why making art is so important for me and look, here I go, swimming up into my own head, theorising about the importance of making art, and how boring it is and no wonder there are so many critics in the world 'cos it's always easier talking about it than doing it :)
And my inner eight year old starving artist girl is just waiting patiently for 6 o'clock. She switches off from all this intellectual theorising about everything. She's excited, thrilled, and can't wait to meet new people. Even while my inner cultural attache is nervous about meeting new people because people are sometimes yukky and because she's more concerned about getting around with a collapsed decolletage and horrid lines snaking across her delicate under eye area because it's not good for the brand. The inner artist sighs. It's tiring living with all these annoying people but it's just how it is, you know? And it's not all bad. There's some pretty interesting sorts living in here too. Quite partial to the Man with the child in his eyes. He gets about and talks to everyone. Keeps us all in line :)
The inner artist is sitting quiet. She's just waiting for 6 o'clock.
+++
PS: You may be pondering "mental illness" reading this post. Multiple personality disorder, maybe. Well, who's to say I don't veer over into mental illness from time to time? More's the point - who's to say that we all don't? Funnily enough, I have never felt more "together" than I do now even while I often feel like I could bust apart. It's all about becoming real, I think. And so while I may have some definite elements of mental disorder, multiple personalities aren't one of them. Those are simply creative devices :) Just sayin', just in case you're wonderin' :)
I keep expecting bad things are gonna come out of the clay, deep, dark secrets that foretell doom and gloom. Nothing I have made from clay has done that. Last week at art therapy I began moulding clay with my intellect switched off. What came out was half a nut, cut in half. The middle of a nut is called a kernel. At the same time I kept seeing this shape as also being like a piece of furniture in some weird way. I kept imagining a figure reclining on it and something to do with seeds. Then it came to me later that night - a seedbed. This is a kernel and a seedbed and all these metaphors and alliterations and playful word puns come out effortlessly of the deeper, darker, excitinger, mysteriouser part of me, not the boring, stupid, pain in the arse that often controls my mind :)
She's doing it this morning. She's thinking that it's all her. I want to go on a word fast sometime soon where for 24 hours the only words allowed out of my mouth or my keyboard are poetry or metaphor or song :) I'm so tired of hearing myself think! But then the deeper, more mysteriouser part speaks and I am left gobsmacked again at how far I extend beyond consumer lines and familial lines and social networking lines and beyond my own conscious lines. And this is why making art is so important for me and look, here I go, swimming up into my own head, theorising about the importance of making art, and how boring it is and no wonder there are so many critics in the world 'cos it's always easier talking about it than doing it :)
And my inner eight year old starving artist girl is just waiting patiently for 6 o'clock. She switches off from all this intellectual theorising about everything. She's excited, thrilled, and can't wait to meet new people. Even while my inner cultural attache is nervous about meeting new people because people are sometimes yukky and because she's more concerned about getting around with a collapsed decolletage and horrid lines snaking across her delicate under eye area because it's not good for the brand. The inner artist sighs. It's tiring living with all these annoying people but it's just how it is, you know? And it's not all bad. There's some pretty interesting sorts living in here too. Quite partial to the Man with the child in his eyes. He gets about and talks to everyone. Keeps us all in line :)
The inner artist is sitting quiet. She's just waiting for 6 o'clock.
+++
PS: You may be pondering "mental illness" reading this post. Multiple personality disorder, maybe. Well, who's to say I don't veer over into mental illness from time to time? More's the point - who's to say that we all don't? Funnily enough, I have never felt more "together" than I do now even while I often feel like I could bust apart. It's all about becoming real, I think. And so while I may have some definite elements of mental disorder, multiple personalities aren't one of them. Those are simply creative devices :) Just sayin', just in case you're wonderin' :)
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