“Dancing on the Moon”
At 10 o’clock I was lying in bed reading a book and laughing out loud. Six hours later I was awake, blinking in the darkness, feeling anxious about some professional and personal matters. What happened in between was a mystery. Happily for me the anxiety passed rather quickly. I suddenly became more interested in how I could go from laughter to anxiety in such a short time, when nothing, but nothing, had circumstantially changed. Ironically, this shift of focus away from anxiety towards curiosity was the root of the matter, but there’s that forest-for-the-trees phenomenon that seems to get us with nearly the same frequency as the Charlie Brown-Lucy-football phenomenon. (Sigh.)
At any rate, earlier in the day I’d been reading Aristotle, my favorite philosopher king, so I thought I’d apply that wise man’s logistical approach to my dilemma, and I went through a series of queries to see how I’d gone from A to B. So…
Could I have been visited by phantasms? Possibly, though I’ve never understood exactly what a phantasm is, so this was crossed off the list, as was any attempt at understanding Aristotle when he begins talking about phantasms. But seriously, folks… All right, then. Start externally with what we know to be true. Had any physical circumstances changed between points A & B? Not really. It was quieter, maybe, but the room and my body were identical. I was perhaps digesting food, but this does not produce anxiety by itself. And what of circumstantial changes with direct effect? Had I received any information between A & B? Again, no. Everything I knew at 4am I knew at 10pm. And what of outside nautral forces unseen? Was the brain moving through a cycle of thoughts that inevitably includes the good, the bad and the ugly and I happened to awaken during the bad and the ugly? Unlikely. The mind is not a merry-go-round with a schedule to keep. There is no discernible pattern to the mental horses coming around.
I went on in this manner for a few minutes, adding a few more questions, breaking the inquiry out further and further, and always finding a simple way to negate their premises. I eventually concluded that the one thing that had changed was, simply enough, a random shift in what I had decided to think about. The only change had occurred in my mind, by my mind, of my mind, but it was, somewhere, somehow, mine to keep.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. If the mind is capable of stepping left and right in midnight two-steps, does it have to be on auto-pilot, or can we put some black and white foot marks down on the floor and dance to our own number? Thinking seems to be both an arbitrary and elective process. I can concentrate on something when I want to, or I can be swept away in thought. One is not more true than the other. I can feel fine at 10pm and lousy at 4am, despite nothing being different.
I’m given to the idea that we can exert much more control than we do, that you, me, Tom, Dick and Harry can all choose to feel a certain way, can decide to think about things, and can wake up at 4am and tell ourselves to go back to sleep just like snapping our fingers. If you disagree, that’s fine. But I’m going to start with the idea that it can be done and see where it takes me. After all, nobody landed on the moon by writing “This will never happen” on the motivational whiteboard. And I hear the moon is lovely this time of year.
For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.