The stuck mind

How to see it, bear it, and work with it

Image by Cottonbro on Pexels

Hey there everyone —

I’m awake, suddenly. I feel the cat pressing against me, snuggled into the blanket. The streetlight is reflecting off the ceiling, orange streaks. My body is singing and whining in all its particular places. The dark has a thickness to it, like heavy drapery. I can’t make out shapes in the room.

I wait for my mind to cue the day’s list of tasks. I listen for the scheduler part of me to join in, sorting the tasks into time slots. I’m used to waking into this thinking, my mind shaking my body awake with a tight chest and a pounding heart. You’re behind! Let’s get going! This time, it’s quiet in there. Blank. Not empty. Not spacious. Closed down altogether, like my 10 year old laptop when the battery has flatlined.

My mind wants me to know how stuck it is, but it doesn’t have words for it, so it wakes me, seeking companionship. There’s nothing to describe. No problem to solve. It’s gone over and over the options, and there’s no way forward. No power to harness. No plan to execute. Just an internal darkness, matched by the night.

I feel sorry for it. Poor mind, helpless. Poor me, wide awake with no comfort to give.

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Therapy doesn’t have a lot to say about ordinary despair. It can be distinguished from depression because the thinking pattern is repetitive, but the content is not distorted. Mainstream therapy, especially Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, often provides strategies to address the “catastrophic thinking” that often accompanies depression. The depressed mind leaps to the worst outcome and broods there. Or, it ping-pongs back and forth between one or two worst-case scenarios, trying to grasp control by anticipating and then rehearsing what it will do when the dreaded outcome finally happens.

The mind leaps forward to the catastrophic end point in a misguided attempt to harness and overcome the anxiety of uncertainty in the present. Though it seems illogical to ruminate on disaster, it’s a protective strategy. If the physical experience of anxiety is intolerable—and it often is, in its itchiness, its panting exhaustion, its rapid heartbeat and inability to stay physically still—then problem solving a future horrible outcome seems like it might calm us down. We can recognize our level of distress by the effort we put forward, spending our days thinking through horrifying events that haven’t yet occurred.

But what if our thinking isn’t distorted? What if we’re not depressed; it’s just simple reality that has us stuck? What then?

It’s at this point that I usually step over the line between therapy and philosophy to examine what it means to want. In many Buddhist traditions, a core principle of existence is that aversion and avarice and attachment get us into this stuck place. We are strongly opposed to the diminishment of our pleasure; we want more and more of the good stuff; we want it to stay here forever; we want a growth mindset and a growth portfolio and a growing number of people to tell us we’re marvelous. And if we can’t have it, right now, we tantrum, or we distract, or we try to change our consciousness with substances, or love affairs, or self sabotage, to get things fired up. Oh boy! says the mind, something exciting is finally happening! There’s suffering, with all the drama, and then there’s suffering that’s like a cracked dirt landscape, with no cloud in sight.

There’s a dispositional aspect to this Buddhist framing. One way out of stuckness, from this perspective, is awareness. I can watch my mind grasping, and I can watch my frustration and impatience and mental foot stomping, and I can marvel at the ways my mind is imbuing my present moment with unhappiness. I can sit with my discomfort; I can send myself and others compassion as I do so; I can watch the quality of the grasping and misery shift and diminish as the minutes pass and the energy drops.

One thing I’ve been wondering about, though, is the difference between a stuckness that is a consequence of want—I want “this,” whatever it is, to be different—and the stuckness that is a consequence of unrelenting tasks. Of doing, not because we want to, not because it’s going to make a difference in the world, but because this is what we are required to do, “we” being those of us complying with the dominant culture’s framing of time, and work, and the organization of space, and shopping centers, and highways, and time management systems, and all that. It is of course possible to bring awareness to the present moment amidst all of this. But the sheer amount of doing that most people have to get through, each day, makes achieving that awareness incredibly difficult, not just because of aversion, but because of the constant push it takes to navigate late capitalism.

In each day, most of us make to do lists, stay on hold with customer service, fill out forms that inevitably have to be resubmitted, review contracts, fill out insurance claims, pay bills, make budgets, punch time clocks, attend meetings, wait for the bus, make dinner, switch out the laundry, care for a child or an elder, stop to get milk, change the oil in the car, return the library books, monitor satisfaction scores, schedule annual reviews, skim emails, and finally, at the end of the day, watch television or play a video game in a moderately stupefied haze.

Sure, there’s aversion to this level of tedium. That’s the feeling. But I’ve been wondering about what all this doing does to the mind itself: is the stuck mind a consequence of its relentless repetition, and the dominant culture’s mass shrug at the effect of this kind of living, not only on our bodies, but on the quality of thinking itself? If the tasks that fill my days are usual and routine, will I get out of the practice of thinking, itself?

If I am detached from my own mind because I don’t want to endure not only the tedium of the task, but the awareness of what my mind would prefer to be doing, but can’t, because it’s harnessed to the mundane, what then am I practicing? Am I going to be in a kind of dissociated fog, not because I’m escaping trauma, but because I can’t be bothered to be present, if to be present is to coach myself into staying numb?

Is it any wonder that scrolling a cell phone is the perfect activity to do in “breaks” from this kind of daily task completion? It harmonizes energetically with the doing and the dissociated numbing that’s required to stay “in” the doing. It asks nothing of us; it will not throw us into the kind of epiphany that requires action; it will not rupture the trance.

I think about this question in part because of the enormous schism between what is “happening” globally, nationally, ecologically, that influences every aspect of our lives and our access to power and community and Being, and the cultural imperative that in order to be a “responsive” and “productive” and “reasonable” citizen we must spend our days in a haze of bureaucratic doing. The term “cognitive dissonance” is at this point almost insulting.

How can we access the ingenuity, the prophetic knowing, the daring creativity that our minds and bodies are capable of, that this moment demands of us, when our days slip away in this peculiar organization of our time? What if the stuckness is not only a quality of mind, but an actual experience of contradiction between what we are doing with our days and what we know must be done to address the pain and suffering of the present and what we wish we were doing, all together, in this moment, to express our joy and our brilliance and our capacity to move into an entirely different way of Being?

What then?

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca