when thoughts hither-thither

The art of honing a scattered mind

Preface

Is it a platitude to say I love words? The way they open out into more words when you seek their definition. The way their webs of meaning spread silklike across ages, cultures, sports references. When deciding on a subtitle for this piece two words were present: To hone and To harness.

Word choice carries weight. Its own, and that of entities like time, place, privilege. I’ve been fascinated by this idea since reading Cassandra Speaks in which Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, illuminates just how much our culture uses war terms in our day-to-day, and in so doing uncovers undertones of violence coursing deep and fast throughout it.

Is it any wonder rates of domestic violence, school shootings, bullying are so high when we say we say we’re off to attack our homework, take a shot at a new hobby. When someone blows up in conversation, when companies go to war, when the kitchen after baking the sweetest of cakes looks like a battlefield.

I digress (on theme for what’s to come) - I wanted to examine these words, to narrow in on their impact. To Harness has a violence to it, a subduing. A harness (noun) is a set of straps and fittings by which a horse is fastened to a cart, controlled by its driver. I do not think I want to fasten straps to my mind.

A hone (noun) is a whetstone, something used to sharpen razors. This is less relevant to my subject matter. To hone (verb) is to smooth and sharpen, especially a blade; to refine or perfect something over a period of time. Perfectionism aside (I even wrote a letter in its dismissal), I love the idea of sharpening, refining my mind as the years roll on. The mind, after all, is sharp and fast — in the tarot the mind is associated with the suit of swords, and in astrology with the signs of Gemini, Libra and Aquarius. The mind moves fast, and sharpened things can move swiftly and more effectively. It needs to be grounded in the body, upon the earth. If your thoughts are moving fast, it is advisable to bring your attention, simply, to your feet.

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That which proceeds the preface

Butterfly Brain

diverging, neurally

I come from a family of high-functioning neurodivergence. This is not an easy thing to admit. To you and all my friends and even my enemies I am vehement in my belief that neurodivergence is not weakness, is in fact closer to a gift.

You’re familiar with that feeling of being able to be better, give better, love better your friends. Others we see in studio light.

But our skin, our bones? These hues are always lit by the harshest of luminescence.

Speaking honestly, deep within me is shame over what may be neurodivergence, what is certainly an architecture of nervous system that deviates from those of the white men at the helms of many of the world’s louder systems.

The shame is a wound that festers; its itch tends to train my attention on thoughts of self-dissatisfaction and a drive for self-betterment that is not actually aligned with what you might call truth - the truth I sense when my body is soft and my mind is quiet. The perceived wound takes my energy away from lovely things.

Yet -

a lake of one’s own

Nearby it is a wide lake. It glitters in all kinds of light: moon, morning, midday, twi-. The water within it is rich. It is ever nourishing, so long as I remember to dip my limbs into it, to bring it with cupped hands to my lips that are growing dry as winter draws near for the twenty seventh time in my life.

The lake is one of possibility. It is an unending source of vitality and energy. There is a rippling of passion here, an unquenchable thirst for the beauty of the ordinary. The water incites a hunger to consume more of the spectrum of the colour green from leaves adorning foreign spaces.

This body of water can cause my mind to flutter, to be agile like the waves of the ocean. It is sometimes still yet mostly it is restless, alive with the movement and glisten of a trillion scales. It’s surface churns with butterflies flitting hither-tither.

From the outside one might see this lake and say, might think — this is a place lacking order. This is a place that could use a singular focus. Pick fish or insects but not both. If there were more discipline and single-mindedness this place could be highly profitable. We could call it, fish lake, or butterfly pond and tie the branding up in a neat little bow. We could use a consistent font in its marketing. The person within whose womb this lake exists would be better focusing on one thing.

But what if there is another way?

finding flight

I discovered the whisper of another way one thursday evening that I cannot believe was three years ago, now. It was the first time I allowed a dipping of my left big toe into the world of writing, exchanging what felt like a despicably self-indulgent and wholly unnecessary $20 for a seat in a writer’s group held in the back room of the Fitzroy Library.

A poet, the host - Wren is her name - landed beside me for a little while. I hadn’t actually been writing, just moving notes around. Finding my feet in this new space, eyeing the ‘writers’ around me, determining whether I fit in, if I even I wanted to, what it might look like from the outside, forgetting to listen to an inner symphony of click-click-click-click-humming into place.

Wren has ADHD and has won awards, published several works. To my confession of difficulty focusing on just one thing, she said her way through this very common obstacle course is to let herself ‘butterfly brain’.

scatter-brain as experiment

This very work is the result of allowing myself to do just that — to flutter and see what happens. It feels radical, a little rebellious, far too easy perhaps, to dare believe that an allowing to unfold is as good a way as any to create. Yet I think it may be a necessary part of the process.

I’d sat down for an hour to read, you see, and not a minute less. Just do it, just focus, I told myself. Yet two pages in my mind was alive and humming, doing the click-click-clicking thing again. The very act of sitting down to read had opened up a whole world of meaning and beauty that I felt called to explore, express and to share.

And in another time - just yesterday even, and probably tomorrow - I’d force myself to push through. To keep reading even as the words became void of meaning because my mind was conducting the act of reading like a punishment rather than a privilege.

But today? I have two newsletters written within 22 minutes. Not perfect, not by any means, but you’d have to present a pretty hard argument - akin to those of my lawyer ex-boyfriend anytime I said basically anything - to this not being productive.

the art of catching

Many great creators speak of the act of art as a kind of catching. Director and author David Lunch writes that capturing ideas is like catching fish. The beautiful Tess Guinery, whose graceful approach to living and creating harmoniously offers an unending pool of inspiration, calls her substack Catching Shower Flowers - an ode to the mystical process by which ideas arrive in the shower; when the mind is elsewhere or gloriously nowhere at all.

I am still working on my relationship to my own ‘neurodivergence’. Many days I hate the term. I was once obsessed with psychology in the therapeutic sense - forced my butterfly brain through a structured syllabus to be accepted into a highly competitive masters program -, and thought all of the mind’s ‘malfunctions’ could be dissolved with the right concoctions of theory, therapy, and diagnosis. I’ve since veered away from this belief for a while, though may well return one day with more of my own experience.

For now, while I do not know if I have ADHD (I plan to write more about my failed diagnosis, which was one of the only tests I’ve ever failed, and by far the most depressing), I do know that my mind works in mysterious ways.

I do see how I’ve spent an incorrigible amount of lifeforce beating myself for this. So much so that to write these words wets my otherwise dry eyes — to have lived those numbered youthful years disgraced at myself for not being able to do it like everyone else seemed to.

But what if there is another way?

spiralling upward

When I zoom out I see that in fact, impossibly, my life is terribly beautiful. I can see that in my own way, I’ve been able to put tens of thousands of those things we call dollars into those things they call “shares”. That last weekend I hosted three beautiful friends; that I, even with a scattered mind, was able to clean and cook and make their beds and they had a lovely time and I don’t think they once doubted my productivity, even if sometimes I may have cut off the words that fell from their beautiful lips because my mind was jumping forwards and way out to the left, so energised by the discussion yet perhaps operating at a slightly different pace.

When I zoom out, I am immensely proud of the decisions I have made, of the efforts I have invested, of the actions I’ve taken to be where I am. To be able to sit down on a Tuesday afternoon to read. To find myself writing two things at once. To smile at my mind flitting from petal to lily pad, sometimes beating its wings to get closer to a feeling, then others simply coaxing unresistingly upon a breeze.

Besides, are butterflies not one of the most poetic creatures to flit across the many colours and textured surfaces of this earth?

Is flitting not a light way of moving through space?

Is there not value in the doing of things differently?

Is this not how we learn and grow from one another?

What would it mean to hone, instead of to harness? To make better use of the energy that is, sooner than restrain it?

If you are at all like me, could you love your hither-thither? What might it mean to experiment with letting it fly, rather that funnelling all you’ve got into unhappy attempts to cage it behind regulation steel bars?

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

- David Lynch

Thank you for reading, your time means the world.

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Love always,