Do you ever have a mental tiredness that saturates your being so much that even your inner voice is muted – or even silent? I feel that way right now.
Don’t feel sorry for me; I had a great week! But there were so many ideas, words, and experiences that there’s “no room at the inn” of my brain. If concepts, musings, recollections, even lightbulb moments somehow landed in my gray matter right now, I would callously and rudely turn them away. There’s no room! I’m full up. Go away, great ideas, sage reflections and profound thoughts – I can’t deal with you today!
I am so grateful to have such a stimulating intellectual life and so many incredible opportunities to learn from others (at work and in my personal life); this temporary mental exhaustion is a fabulous price to pay for that. I’m just surprised by this intellectual numbness…even though I have the time and opportunity for the first time this week to create a blog post, I can’t think of a single topic to share with you today other than my overwhelming desire to think about nothing, talk about nothing, do nothing.
So that’s what I’m doing right now: nothing. Sitting on the patio not really listening to a distant neighbor’s dog halfheartedly bark. Barely registering the gentle May breeze on my skin, absentmindedly flicking away the mosquito dropping in for a bite. Looking up at the airplanes from the nearby airport and not imagining their exciting destinations.
Even the cardinal on the feeder doesn’t get me wondering where his mate is, or if there are fledglings in a nest that he’s gathering food for. Or why I can’t make the camera focus.
It strikes me (yes, I guess a stray thought got in!) that perhaps this mindlessness / mental exhaustion is a cousin of meditation. Maybe I’m on the way to “empty mind meditation” or mental silence that will declutter my brain and bring on a state of nirvana.
Let’s go with that.
This is lovely. It’s strange in timeliness too because I was just writing about feeling like something I attended was good, but how I felt so much better to just be at home again and doing nothing particular. My mind needs that too.
Yes, maybe it is like resting a field every three years so that it will grow fertile again. Resting our minds – even for an hour or two – has to be a good thing.