Sho mo nai!

Thought blocks

I suspect that the very nature of what I want to write about prevents me from being able to provide a good example. Thought blocks. Blocks that stand in the way of clear logical thought. Or perhaps blocks that stand in the way of actually considering every possibile outcome or option. Paper helps. Paper beats rock, right? Writing or planning things out on paper sometimes enables me to see an aspect that for some reason I have until then refused to consider. And it is a kind of refusal. Sometimes I am aware that there is something that I am refusing to bring into consideration, an explanation that I refuse to acknowledge as possible. It like I can feel it at the edges of my mind, trying to push into the light of conscious thought, and I can feel the thing resisting it, and often I think the thing resisting it is me. Usually it's not "something too horrible to think" but rather it seems like I refuse to allow that possiblity because the result that I get without considering it is more pleasant to me. Or if not more pleasant, then more convenient for my desires at that moment. And that is frightening.

What would happen if I end up in a group of people who all have the same thought blocks? Social disaster, at the worst, maybe a slough of selfishness at best?

I'm sure that most people have thought blocks, barriers and walls. But there are ways of minimizing their number. Being a person who generally thinks outside of his head, tsumari, a person who talks his thoughts out, I think that my Kamikatsu life has been detrimentary in that regard. Normally I used to get all my stupid thoughts countered by the people around me, but now I am around far fewer people, or at least far fewer people who reguarly challenge me.

As I think about it, there is another phenomenon in my brain that while it may be the same in effect as a thought block, results from a faulty filing system rather than an obstacle. I really appreciate people who file their thoughts in cascading trees of concepts, or neatly labeled boxes which they can sort through. As for myself my thoughts don't really get sorted or filed, they just kind of get attached like rings on a chain, or perhaps like magnets in strings. So if something is the last link or magnet on a given chain or string, the only way to get to it is to follow the line. If there is a chain being built, a keyword can sometimes form a connection to an old chain and then following the string to the end leads to a perhaps seemingly random thought. These "random thoughts" are one of my life's great joys. And this is why I don't change the system. The downside is that if someone asks me to recall something stored at the end of a chain, I have a hard time finding it. I stand there in the room of my brain amongst a floor cluttered with different chains, and I have no idea which ones have joke files stored at the end of them. Some of them are pretty easy to find, because the jokes themselves are chains, like 20 blonde jokes or lawyer jokes that all were absorbed at the same time, but nobody wants to hear those. So I give up looking. I know there are chains that have great jokes or specific stories in there somewhere, but the only way to find them is by tripping over them when some keyword has linked to it suddenly. Did I ever tell you that I heard the sound of my brain when I was in India? It sounded like a giant clock or a mill or a wooden waterworks. Unfortunately, because some of the chains never get found or used, they corrode and links fall off and there are pieces here and there that are a few links long but not connected to anything.

Maybe thought blocks and a bad filing stem from my personality. No, surely they do.

Now why the hell was I typing this in the first place?

posted by Fletcher @ 10:34 p.m.