Thinking about Thinking

Or, How I Tried to Get Outside My Head and Discovered There Was a Waiting Room

I recently became aware that I was thinking.

This might sound like an unremarkable development, particularly for someone who (like everyone else) has spent the better part of his life doing it, but the discovery was startling. I was sitting in a chair, staring at nothing in particular, when it occurred to me that I was having a thought.

More specifically, I was thinking about something I had thought about earlier, which led me to consider why I had thought it, which prompted the suspicion that I was now thinking about thinking, a development that seemed to require some kind of intervention.

I tried to stop. This was my first mistake.

The problem with trying not to think is that it immediately introduces a new thought, namely: I must not think. The mind, apparently, has no understanding of irony. Tell it to be quiet and it produces a committee. Tell the committee to disperse and it appoints a subcommittee to investigate the circumstances under which the original committee was formed.

Within seconds, I was thinking about not thinking, thinking about the fact that I was thinking about not thinking, and wondering whether the person who was noticing all this was the same person who had started the whole business. Cogito, ergo WTF.

I was becoming a small corporation. Or possibly a school board.

There is a word for this, of course. There always is. Metacognition. It is the ability to think about thinking, which sounds useful in the same way that owning a second refrigerator sounds useful. At first, you imagine the convenience. Then you discover that you have twice as much food to worry about and that neither refrigerator is capable of making a decision. Moreover, now you can leave two doors open by mistake.

Metacognition promises perspective. It suggests that somewhere above the ordinary, chattering mind there is a calm, elevated observation deck from which one can survey the landscape of one’s thoughts without being dragged into them. I pictured myself up there, wearing a tasteful linen shirt, perhaps holding a cup of Sanka Instant Decaf, watching my mental activity drift past like clouds.

Instead, I found myself in a basement, examining a thought about a thought concerning the possibility that I might be in a basement. Not to mention the possibility that Sanka is short for sans caféine. Never thought of that before. Sans taste. Or anything at all. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything …

But where was I? Oh yes. The observation deck, it turned out, was another room inside the building. And there was a maintenance fee.

I began experimenting with mindfulness, which I understood to mean paying attention to the present moment without judging it. This seemed reasonable until I attempted it. I sat quietly and focused on my breathing.

Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

Hold.

Inhale.

And hold.

Then I noticed I was breathing. I noticed that I was noticing my breathing. I wondered whether noticing my breathing was interfering with the natural breathing process, which seemed unfair to my lungs, given that they had been doing a perfectly adequate job without my supervision for several decades.

Fighting off a brief sensation of drowning in a bottomless lake of consciousness, I tried to return my attention to the breath. But was I really paying attention to the breath, or was I performing the appearance of paying attention?

Was I trying to be mindful because I wanted peace, or because I wanted to become the sort of person who could casually mention my adventures in mindfulness at dinner parties? And if I was hoping to become that person, wasn’t I simply adding another layer of vanity to an already overcrowded psychological landscape? Had I found my mind in a brown paper bag within?

My lungs, meanwhile, had gone on strike. I opened my eyes. The room was still there. The chair was still there. A small pile of laundry had assumed the proportions of an archaeological site. And I had achieved nothing except a more sophisticated awareness of my failure.

Om Nama Unshivaya: I bow to the Lord of Inauspiciousness.

This is the peculiar trap of introspection: every attempt to examine the mind produces more mind. The investigator and the subject are the same person, and neither is willing to leave the premises. It is like hiring a private detective to investigate your marriage, only to discover that the detective is your spouse wearing a false moustache.

You ask yourself why you are anxious. You answer that you are anxious, Monsieur Poirot, because the little grey cells flutter and heave too much.

You then worry that worrying too much might be evidence of a deeper psychological problem. You examine the deeper problem. You discover that you are anxious about the examination. You check the relentless red glow of the alarm clock. It is 3:18 a.m. and your tossing on a restless bed is beginning to seriously PO the wife.

She, too, is thinking but not yet speaking aloud something our exasperated 1950s moms used to say when our snivelling and whinging exceeded the limits of their patience: “I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Eventually, you are no longer anxious about the original problem, which is somewhat reassuring because you can’t remember what it was. But wait. What if that’s an early warning sign of dementia?

You are anxious about the fact that you have become the sort of person who can be anxious about being anxious. Congratulations! You now have achieved a kind of emotional compound interest, with every feeling generating additional feelings at an increasingly unreasonable rate.

At some point, the original anxiety has disappeared, but the paperwork remains. For example, I once spent an entire afternoon trying to determine whether I was genuinely enjoying a book. The book was perfectly good. I had no complaints about the prose, the characters or the general arrangement of the pages. But halfway through, I caught myself wondering whether I was enjoying it or merely enjoying the idea of being someone who enjoyed it.

I considered the possibility that I was reading for pleasure, then questioned whether pleasure was being experienced or simply anticipated. Perhaps I was enjoying the prospect of enjoying the book. Perhaps I was enjoying my awareness of the enjoyment. Perhaps I was enjoying the fact that I was sufficiently self-aware to question my enjoyment.

By the time I reached this stage, I had stopped reading. I was holding the book open to the same page, unable to proceed, like a man who has been asked to identify a suspect and has instead become fascinated by the concept of identification per se.

I put the book down and looked out the window. A squirrel was sitting on a fence. It appeared to be doing nothing in particular, and doing it with considerable confidence. It wasn’t wondering whether it was sufficiently present in the moment. It wasn’t examining the relationship between observation and identity. It wasn’t concerned that its enjoyment of the fence might be performative.

Or perhaps it was. Nuts!

For all I knew, the squirrel was engaged in a sophisticated inquiry into the nature of sciuromorphic consciousness. Perhaps it had spent the morning wondering whether the sensation of being a squirrel was authentic or simply a narrative constructed by its brain. Perhaps it was questioning the distinction between acorns and the idea of acorns.

I watched it for several minutes. Then I began wondering whether my envy of cosmic squirrelhood was itself a form of thinking that prevented me from appreciating the moment. The squirrel flicked its tail and bounded away. I would have done the same if only I could.

But screw the little rodent. For there is also the question of who, exactly, is doing the noticing to consider. When I say, “I notice that I am thinking,” who is the I doing the noticing? Is it a separate observer? Is it the same mind wearing a different hat? And if it is the same mind, what happens when I notice the observer noticing the thought?

Do I need another observer? And if so, who observes that observer? At this point, the mind begins to resemble one of those Russian matryoshka dolls, except that every doll contains another doll that is slightly more neurotic and comes with a variable-rate mortgage.

You open the first doll and find a second one thinking about the first. Inside that is a third one worrying about whether the second one is sufficiently self-aware. The fourth is having a panic attack about the implications of the third. By the time you reach the smallest doll, it is sitting on a tiny couch, wondering whether it has ever really been happy.

What are your thoughts on the matter, Dr. Freud?

“You see, ze penis goes in za vagina. Zis is normal. Everything else ist, how you say, phallic stage sublimation.”

(There’s a long-standing myth that men think about sex every seven seconds. And zis ist za best my over-decaffeinated mind can come up with? No wonder it’s a myth.)

The point is, there is no final doll. There is only a progressively smaller couch. I tried to explain this problem to a friend, who suggested that I simply live in the moment.

“How?” I asked.

“Stop overthinking.”

“I’ve tried.”

“Then stop trying.”

“How do I do that?”

He looked at me with the exhausted expression of a man who had inadvertently regurgitated the entire philosophy department at the University of Saskatchewan, circa 1976.

“Just try,” he said.

So I washed the dishes. For a brief moment, this worked. I held a plate beneath the tap and watched the water run over it. The sponge made a pleasant squeaking noise. A small amount of soap collected near the drain. I was doing something ordinary, physical, entirely free of metaphysical implications.

Then I wondered whether I was washing the dishes mindfully.

I began considering the relationship between the dishwashing activity and my awareness of the dishwashing activity. Was I actually present, or was I merely monitoring my presence? Was I experiencing the water, or evaluating my experience of the water? Was the plate clean, or was I simply satisfied with the narrative of having cleaned it?

Eventually, I distinctly heard the voice of Madge the manicurist from 27 pitiless years of low-budget Palmolive commercials: Relax. You’re soaking in it.

As with baked-on grime, I have come to suspect that the mind’s most diabolical trick is convincing us that we can eliminate the lumpy bits by examining them closely and scrubbing. We imagine that if we look deeply enough, we will eventually arrive at some quiet place beyond thought, a clearing in the forest where nothing needs to be explained.

But every examination creates another examiner. Every attempt at distance becomes another form of proximity. We construct an imaginary balcony from which to observe ourselves, then spend the afternoon wondering whether the balcony is really outside the house.

We are forever trying to step outside our minds, only to discover that the exit leads to another hallway.

There are doors. There are windows. There are rooms labelled PRESENCE, AWARENESS, ACCEPTANCE and PLEASE STOP MAKING THIS WORSE, YOU SURREPTITIOUS BASTARD. Some rooms contain cushions. So many that you can’t find a place to sit. Others contain books by people who appear to have successfully escaped their own consciousness, although I suspect they are simply better at marketing the experience.

I came across a similar but better metaphor last week in James Boswell’s 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, the greatest biography ever written. The two men had been discussing death, but for our purposes here, feel free to pick any unpleasant topic you like:

… his thoughts upon this awful change were in general full of dismal apprehensions. His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisaeum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgment, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drove them back in their dens, but not killing them, they were still assailing him.

Occasionally, my internal, not so mighty gladiator imagines that he has finally reached the outside of the Colosseum.

I am walking down the street. I am looking at trees. I am buying an apple. I am experiencing the unremarkable miracle of being alive without narrating every second of it. The bearable lightness of being free of burdensome thoughts.

Then a crack appears. It widens into a shadow, trembling in a patch of light.

Hmm, I seem to be doing very well at not thinking.

And there it is again. The mind has followed me out. Fiddlesticks and bother!

I think the closest I have come to understanding the problem occurred this morning when I was trying to meditate and heard a noise in the kitchen. I opened my eyes, got up, and discovered that the refrigerator door had been left ajar.

For once, I had a genuine problem that required no interpretation. The milk was warm. The butter was soft. A container of leftover soup had become suspiciously philosophical.

I closed the door. And then, naturally, I began wondering why I had left it open in the first place.

Had I been distracted? Was this evidence of an inability to remain present? Was my carelessness related to my ongoing preoccupation with consciousness? Had I become so interested in observing my mind that I had forgotten to observe the refrigerator?

I stood there, holding the handle. Then I noticed that I was thinking about noticing that I was thinking about noticing.

And suddenly I broke on through to the other side. An epiphany!

Not because I had solved anything, but because the whole enterprise had become so ridiculous. There I was, a fully grown adult, standing in a kitchen, conducting an elaborate philosophical investigation into the consciousness of a man who couldn’t even remember to close a refrigerator.

Perhaps this is where the freedom lies. Not in escaping thought, not in finding the perfect observer, not in ascending to some enlightened mezzanine where the mind finally shuts up. Perhaps it lies in occasionally recognizing the absurdity of the whole arrangement.

You are thinking. You notice that you are thinking. You notice that you have noticed. You wonder whether noticing is helpful. You wonder whether wondering is the problem.

And then the kettle boils. The telephone rings. The wife asks where you put the scissors. Life, which has been waiting patiently outside the door while you conduct your investigation, finally clears its throat.

You look for the scissors. You might even find them.

Although, come to think of it, you might start to wonder whether you have found the scissors or merely become aware of the experience of finding them.

And that, I suppose, is the human condition: an endless succession of thoughts about thoughts, interrupted occasionally by the practical requirement to open a jar.

I have not yet achieved enlightenment. But I have learned to recognize when I am stuck inside my own head. Unfortunately, I have also learned to recognize when I am recognizing it. And now I am thinking about that.

The refrigerator is open again. I wonder how the other one is doing.