Another bedtime whispered conversation, and he tells me about Casey's funny joke, a silly story and he laughs telling it. And then he's on to another story about Mekhi and how he couldn't find the hidden key even though it was right in front of him, and that he was laughing so hard his chest hurt, that he had never before laughed so hard that his chest hurt.
And then he stops and says -- when I think of things, it always makes me think of other things.
When I was a kid I would sit in church and let my train of thought chug on down the track. After ten minutes or so, I'd stop and wonder how on earth I got there. Then I'd backtrack, thought by thought, until I got back to whatever started the whole thing off. I loved it when I could trace it all the way back, it was fun to see those connections, to notice the movement of my own mind.
It's like a spiral, he told me. In my head, this is what it looks like: the thing I'm thinking of is a line, and then the next thing I think of spirals down from the line like this, he tells me, drawing in the air. And then another thing spirals up from the line. That's what it looks like in my head when I think of things. I wish I could connect a tube from my head to your head so you could see exactly what I'm seeing in my head.
He doesn't have to. I know exactly what he means.
I've never told him about spirals, about how in my
writing practice we talk about how that's the path our brains take when we ruminate or tell our stories, when we let them run their courses without our resistance or inner-editors getting in the way. That we start close in, and we go, we travel out far and wide, spanning out to the reaches and then without even trying, we cycle on back to where we started, yet we're in a different place. Sometimes we spiral out, gaining a wider perspective as we go. Other times we work inward to the heart of things. The point being that our stories aren't linear. Sure, there's a beginning, middle, and end; but the ending is really just another beginning, and it often looks a whole lot like the place from where we originally started.
A couple of years ago, before I was blogging, before my writing practice, I was
reading an essay on writing and the arts, and the author remarked how even when writers aren't writing, they still think like writers. They observe themselves having a thought, there's a narration of sorts running parallel to their experience. When I read that, my heart zinged. I hadn't known that anyone else's brain worked that way. The only way I had ever tried to describe it to anyone was almost confessional. Wondering if I was a weirdo of some kind, I told my husband,
Sometimes I think like I write. I just start describing things in my head - my setting, my thoughts and feelings -- with words I would never use in conversation, but rather the way I would write it. It wasn't until that moment when I read the essay that I realized that that's how writers think. How our brains work.
When I was a little kid, I often heard voices. They weren't scary, because they were my voices, and I knew they were mine, even at 8 years old. But I knew it was weird and I think I only tried to explain it to someone once before I realized that perhaps that was something I ought to keep to myself. I had forgotten about the voices until just now, as I write this post.
That he recognizes the way his mind moves, that he observes himself thinking, that he can track it, that he visualizes the path as a spiral, makes my heart zing. He is not a mini-me, he is himself. But I understand him, I get his brain. And I absolutely delight in his beautiful spirals.
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