In the margins of any student’s notebook you can find evidence of both the laziness and the unquenchable activity of people’s brains. Beside whatever notes may actually apply to the class, there are probably drawings, grocery lists, recipes, poetry and random nonsense.
We all have something our minds wander to when whatever we’re actually doing is boring or we’ve tuned out. (A note to my professors: none of your classes are ever boring, I am enthralled by all of your lectures. This is about other professors and not you.)
There are comfortable places, well-worn mental pathways in each of our brains where we return to our personal little haven of thoughts.
Personally, I daydream about the love of my life — the Atlanta Falcons — rebuilding them into Super Bowl favorites in my mind. I know how much money they can spend, who their good players are, who their bad players are (it’s most of them, therein lies the problem), and who the guys they can draft are. If you ever see me looking zoned out, the odds are good that I’m managing an NFL team in my mind.
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Classes can be boring, and so can a lot of other things. Every day we have those tasks that we do but that don’t require us to really think about them — washing dishes, driving, vacuuming, sitting in Senate on Wednesdays and so on. You get the idea.
We can’t leave the situation, though. The dishes have to be washed and you only get so many absences per class. So we exercise what control we can and leave the room in our heads, imagining greener pastures. Our attention span can’t handle it, so we go somewhere else in the little ways we can.
If anything is interesting enough to keep us out of our imagination stations, that’s a high compliment. Penetrating the noise of a daydream isn’t an easy task. Enjoying something over a stretch of time is Herculean.
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Recently in Digital Photography, Professor Aaron Hardin decided to give the whole class a nice little ego boost. As he talked about nearing the end of the semester, he looked around the room and hit us with it:
“I’m giving you the biggest palm branch I can give you, which is that I’ve had a good time.”
We’d all had a good time. Herculean task complete, 21st century attention span defeated.
But I’m not here to lament the shortened attention spans we all have due to technology and the digital age. Gallons of ink have already been spilled on that subject by people older and wiser and a lot more mad about it than me. I’ll leave the arguments condemning the youths to those writers. They enjoy it more than I would, anyway.
The rub here is this, though: people have always been bored and occupied our minds with something during that boredom. Brother Lawrence was a monk in the 1600s who spent most of his time cutting vegetables and repairing shoes. That time was multi-tasked, though, because he spent it all having little inner conversations with God. He called it “the practice of the presence of God.”
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There’s a word I became obsessed with when I was about 12 years old. It’s that age where things about the world start truly occurring to you for the first time, and it occurred to me that everyone’s thought life was just as complex and meaningful to them as mine was to me. The word I’m talking about is “sonder,” and it means exactly that idea I was talking about: that everybody’s got that same level of complexity to their lives. The word itself is way too self-important and tryhard to use sincerely, but the idea is vital.
We all have movies we rewatch in our minds, little personal obsessions we return to when the world outside our heads is a bit bland or bleak. Those thought movies are more than just idle occupations, though. I think they mean something about who we are. To borrow from Brother Lawrence, the ideas we use to twiddle away time are practice. We’re practicing being something.
It may feel like I’m about to turn this all faux-spiritual. The classic warning that what we think about is who we are, our thoughts define us, and so on and so forth. That may be true, but it’s a little cliche and not what I’m talking about.
My point is simpler. We’ve all got these wonderful brains that can whisk us away from the stiff seat of an hour-and-15-minute class we don’t really love. And those thought lives we escape into are beautiful and complex and a window into who we are. I’m not trying to get all deep and philosophical. I just think that’s pretty cool.