The ups and downs of mental blankness

Thoughts on reconnection

I saw this cowhide belt last week at The Row’s store in Amagansett (where Happier Grocer almonds, Ileana Makri beads, and Free City elastic-hem pants are also for sale) and it launched a search that found me nose to screen with this, which I ordered, thus breaking the unintentional shopping fast I have been on since mid-June.

Last week I wrote that I’m checked out on clothes but this week I think I’ve entered the even deeper state of complete mental blankness. Where initially I would find inspiration and juicy bites of sweetness in the redundancy of the impractical uniform (bathing suit tops! Pareo skirts! Board shorts! Big, single man-made stones hanging from various holes in my ears!) —

— lately it feels more like autopilot.

Is this what extended vacation feels like? There’s a tint of depressive numbness about it at first, but now I’m thinking that’s just the decompression. The beginning of what it’s like to actually free your mind.

All month, I have been searching for a cause to what has felt like an ail. I have run myself through the possibility that maybe it’s cultural feedback I’m lacking.

Sure it’s nice to drive into town and get coffee and sit on a bench as I watch the people going about their mornings.

I saw a man today in a white linen shirt and grayish walking shorts and clogs, with a stack of silver cuffs and beads on his sun tan wrist and no question it moved me —

— but maybe I have grown so used to the chronic stimuli of Manhattan, I told myself, that I expect it to nail me in the face with such overload that when it comes in quietly or less frequently, I barely notice it. It’s like my tastebuds have been shot or something. The harissa may as well be tomato paste.

But then again, the emotional terrain in this state of blank is so sensitive. More raw than I am used to feeling and in this way, the harissa may as well be fire.

I walk to my car in the morning, for example, to drive my kids to camp and when the dew is drying under the July sun and the green on the trees is transforming from the morning’s gold to the most saturated green it will be all day, this intense feeling of gratitude overwhelms me.

But the steepness of the very same peak — the thing about sensitivity overall, is that it can just as easily decline into a valley that I don’t always understand.

It makes me feel a little crazy, for example, when the quiet in my backyard will start to make me mad. When the same trees will sway and it won’t relieve me but will instead start to sound like drills that are burning holes through my ears. I’ll start to wrestle and writhe with a faceless demon then lift my head up (if I am lucky!) to realize that the demon was more like a red robin’s shadow. All this time, I was wrestling with nothing.

I wonder sometimes if all of life truly is a simulation. If there is no true, collective reality, only the ones we develop based on where we’re from and where we go, what we learn and try to shed and then to build and then to be. If the reason biting into the quiet of stillness can feel so uncomfortable or downright painful is precisely because underneath it, the unwavering truth lays itself out over the void to tell you that nothingness is all there is.

There’s a relief about it because I think when you can hear it, you can also recognize there’s no right or wrong or good or bad. That we erect guardrails in the form of our values and principles, likes and dislikes, and in what become our personalities (reflections of how we protect ourselves from and then eventually overcome our earliest pains) so that they can serve as the containers that hold us together and make it possible to move through the world. Which I think is the part that feels relieving to me.

It would be impossible not to do these things and to exist in the material world we have to build personalities and cultivate values and create reasons to find meaning. But we also have the freedom of choice. Yes, we all have to believe something. Better it be something you want to believe, right? That actually serves your expansion. That gives you confidence and enough motivation to go make a life that you love. That opens your heart as opposed to closing it more so that you actually have a shot and touching those around you and maybe even those who are far away.

You can choose to believe the mental blankness is freedom as opposed to a prison and see where that takes you instead. When I think in these terms, I find so much more grace and even awe for the intelligence of the ways we learn to be. For the differences that make us.