The Zen On The Other Side

Blake always used to say that whenever he though he had me figured out, I would do or say something the completely destroyed whatever his theory of the day was. I know that I tend to confuse the hell out of people. Once again, it’s recently been pointed out to me that my mind doesn’t work the way other peoples’ minds work. I don’t bother denying it. It’s been a long time since anyone could call my mindset ‘normal.’ If ever. I fake it well, but the best way to describe my typical mindset would be: ‘functionally insane.’


Not a lot of people know what I’m about to tell you. Or at least, not a lot of people know all of it. Blake was around for parts, but that was during a period were both of us were pretty caught up with goings on in our own lives – or in our own minds, as the case may be. It really arose from extended periods in my teen and early twenties where I didn’t sleep. At least, I didn’t sleep in the normal sense of the word. Even today, that people can close their eyes, drift off, and be totally under for six or seven hours at a time is a bit alien to me.

It started out as general insomnia, and to a certain degree, was self-inflicted. My family moved to a new town when I was about 16, which was not good for me. We had lived in cosmopolitan Silicon Valley. We moved to a small tourist town. Where we were, I had not many close friends, but a lot of friends. I knew some people there who were screwed up not only as badly as I was (which was not all that badly at the time), but who also were screwed up in the same way that I was. There was each of a blond girl and a brunette girl who seemed to find me non-repulsive. I had high hopes.

But in the new town, there really weren’t a lot of people worth knowing. Not many people worth talking to. The simple fact of the matter is that in addition to being a lot smarter than pretty much all of my classmates, I also had much broader interests than any of them – largely by dint of spending so many years in Silicon Valley. In Solvang nobody and nothing was really very interesting, so – aside from hockey – pretty much everything just became annoyance. Buzzing, which kept me from whatever book or project I was distracting myself with. So I started napping in afternoons, and staying up late at night. I LOVED the peace of the late night times. When the rest of the world stopped, and I didn’t have to deal with anyone or anything that I didn’t want to. Those were the best times in Solvang; when I didn’t have to deal with being there. I could lose myself in a book, or a re-run, or a music video, and forget about where I was.

But my sleep habits got REALLY screwed up over those two years, since I would not really sleep, but just sort of doze for a few hours right after school, and then for a few hours around dawn. Besides the sleep schedule, I’m sure it wasn’t healthy that I spent that much time alone. But I did learn a lot about myself. Easy to figure out what you think, why, and how, when you go a year or two spending five or six hours every night alone with your thoughts. It helps when you don’t have a whole lot of conversation going on even during those times where you have no choice but to be around other people. High school, for example.

When I went away to college, my sleep schedule remained fucked up, but I quit being quite so solitary. I had some suitemates who were okay. I kept up email correspondence with some old friends. And, of course, I was playing a lot of hockey.

But about half-way through college, I went through a period where I pretty much stopped sleeping altogether. I started having… nightmares, I guess the word is. Nothing really terrifying, though. Just things that made me not want to sleep. I remember one where I was walking through a forest, and then I realized that they weren’t trees that were surrounding me. They were pikes. And the branches overhead were people that I knew and loved, impaled on the pikes. I walked beneath the shaft that my brother was on, and he reached down and grabbled my shoulder. He said, “Please Matt, can you get me a glass of water?”

Stomach wounds make people unnaturally thirsty.

Or where I was walking through the aftermath of an endless medieval battlefield. Nobody impaled, just endless bodies (and body parts); anyone still alive must have screamed themselves out. My feet squishing in ground muddied with blood. And I was unspeakably tired, so much so that I could barely stand. I was wearing heavy armor, which made staying on my feet that much more difficult. I’d lost my sword, but that didn’t matter, since I no longer had the strength to lift it. I’d lost my helmet as well. Blood and sweat were trickling into my eyes, and I was too tired to lift a hand to wipe it away. For hours I stumbled and staggered through the fields of the fallen. Lifting one foot up, and putting it down (squish in the mud). Then the other (squish). Then the first again (squish). So tired. But keep walking. Keep moving. I will not stop. There must be an end to it, and however exhausted, I must find it. Keep walking. Keep moving. I will not stop. I will not lie down and become one of the fallen.

So I would quit sleeping, at least in the conventional sense. Sometimes for a few nights in a row, sometimes for a few weeks. Never knew how long it would be (or why) before I could close my eyes and find nothing but peace. During those periods without sleep, I never used any real amounts of caffeine or No-Doze or anything like that, just an endless stack of books, cable TV, and an internet connection. I’d usually doze off for a few hours after the sun came up, since I learned that I wouldn’t sleep deeply enough to dream. I’d also occasionally doze off in the early evenings. Blake used to joke about how he’d come home in the late afternoon and find me napping in my chair, with a book open across my chest and a hockey game on TV. He said it was creepy, because if I woke up, I could tell you not only what was going on in the game, but also what the book was about. I sometimes wonder what he must have thought on nights when he woke to go to the bathroom at 3 at 4, and my light was still on. He and I might talk about it some day, if ever we get drunk enough.

In any rate, exhaustion is a relative thing, and a word that gets terribly overused. Everyone has the occasional long, hard day. Where you haven’t had enough to eat, and you’ve been on your feet for hours and hours and hours, and it seems like everyone in the world is set on making things difficult for you. Those sorts of days where all you want to do is just sit down, have a drink, and relax before you pass out for the night. For most people, that’s what exhaustion means. And from a semantic perspective, the word does fit.

But most people (ultra-marathoners being the only consistent civillian exception) never realize that there is a point where you get so tired that you literally lose control of your own mind. Where you no longer have enough energy to reign in your own thoughts, either to focus on some task at hand, or to avoid thinking about painful, embarrassing, or dangerous things. Your thoughts just start flashing in all sorts of directions. Like when you have conversations with someone, and you steadily move from one topic to the next to the next, passing along the crystalline links between concepts and memories and topics. It’s just like that; your mind moving from interconnected idea to idea. No big deal, except when you get too tired, you only have limited control of which direction your mind is going in. And as you grow still more tired, you lose even more of the ability to focus your mind on any give topic. The random jumps between thoughts and memories and subjects speeds up, until it’s going so fast that the ideas never really take recognizable shape except at random intervals, and swirls hither and yon across your lifetime’s worth of memories and knowledge and feelings and ideas. It’s all of them, and you’re just along for the ride. You become a maelstrom of uncontrolled thoughts and feelings and memories.

The nights are the worst. There’s nothing to keep you busy or to distract you from yourself, and your mind runs wild. There are some things you can do to slow it down or otherwise get some relief. If you put on headphones and turn the volume way up, for example, the music will get so loud that you won’t be able to hear your own thoughts anymore. If you do it too much, you’ll do permanent damage to your hearing (I did), but it is a few minutes of peace. Which is like air to a drowning man. Because there are, in comparison, times where your mind is like a hurricane, swirling and raging without any real form, but with infinite energy. At its very worst, you literally cannot stop it: Stupid little things – a casual word from someone, a song on the radio, or even nothing at all – can start a cascade of thoughts and memories that can overwhelm you, and you use what little energy you have left to avoid being swept away on the whirlwind. Memories surface out of the storm, and become… more than just memories. Not like flashbacks, since you never really lose where or who you actually are, (the only hallucinations you get are usually visual and incidental, where you catch a sudden glimpse of something that can’t possibly be there) but they still become more than just memories. You can’t stop them from coming, and while you don’t re-live the event, you do re-live the feelings. Where the memories involve you making a bad decision, you watch as your mind goes through all the events that follow, and all the pain and loss that can follow even a seemingly incidental stupid choice. With a mind and memory like mine, that means possibly rolling through years of consequences, compounded by additional bad decisions along the way. Usually, a different, parallel part of the maelstrom in your head will coalesce into images of what great things might have been if you had only made slightly different choices. That’s always a treat; thinking about the good things you missed, lost, or otherwise fucked up though chance, ignorance, or simple stupidity. You rail against it, try to bring your mind to focus, try to push away the painful memories and broken dreams and stupid decisions, or at least try to keep them from overwhelming you. You usually will succeed, to one degree or another. Usually well enough to remember who and where you are. But you’re still there, threatening to break loose again, and there’s no way to make it go away. No way to turn it off. Nothing to do except wait for the storm to pass, and hope there’s still a little of you left when it does. Nowhere to escape to, except to take a deep breath, and to keep on keeping on. Keep moving, so as to not lie down and become one of the fallen.

The days between the nights are not so bad, but still can be tough. Things are happening and there are people around, to remind you that the world is still there, and going on, and that you can go out into it and be distracted from what’s happening inside your head. But still. You never know when you might need to suddenly walk out of class, or leave work, or cut a conversation short, because you feel your mind taking a turn in a direction that would make being there… awkward. Where you suddenly have to leave… wherever, because you can literally feel your mind crumbling, and people wouldn’t understand that you just need to curl into a ball in a quiet dark place for a while. Close friends are tough to come by, since you show tendencies (or warning signs, as the case may be) of pretty much every common diagnosable psychological disorder. Manic-depressive? Check. Depressive because you have no energy, and because you can’t shake it when your mind seizes onto dark thoughts. Manic because your mind will occasionally seize onto a happy or active idea, and you can’t shake that either. Obsessive-compulsive for the same reason: your mind will either get caught on one track, and come up with images - in graphic and horrifying detail - all the consequences that might arise if you really did turn the gas on when your hand bumped the stove while you walking out of your kitchen this morning. Or just as often, your mind might refuse to focus on anything. ADD? Got that too. There are times in conversations where you literally cannot stop yourself from talking, even though deep inside your head, you know that you’re saying the wrong things that you shouldn’t be saying. Which does tend to sour people on you. Empathy is difficult as well, since when your mind can focus on someone else’s pain or problems, it does it to such a degree that it becomes your pain or problems. And when you can’t focus, you can’t focus AT ALL, and no matter how much pain your friends are in, nothing they might say or do will stand out from the maelstrom in your head. Lots of things just fade into grey, even things that you rationally know you should be paying attention to and dealing with. ‘Moody’ is a descriptor you become very familiar with.

And then night will fall. Everyone else will go to sleep. And the demons will come. I might have mentioned it before, but the nights are the worst.

After it’s happened daily (or weekly) for a few days (or weeks) on end, and after you’ve relived essentially every dark event and dumb decision you’ve ever made – which leads to a remarkable level of self-awareness, by the way, since the analytical parts of your mind are running just as rampantly unchecked as the memory parts of your mind, which memories give plenty of material for analysis – eventually you start to despair over the energy that you have left, and over expending it to keep the maelstrom under any semblance of control. You wonder if the exhaustion of keeping your mind in check is not worse than simply relaxing and letting your mind go.

Sometimes it’s very easy, tempting even, to let the whirlwind rage out of control. To run before the wind instead of reefing the sails, just to see where it goes. Can insanity really be worse than all the pain from keeping it at bay? There have been times in the midst of alcohol-induced… well, I guess psychosis is as good a word as any, that my mind was running in all directions at three AM. All the angels in heaven singing in their choirs, all the demons in hell chanting and pounding their drums, the wind is raging and rain is pounding, and I can’t hold a thought in my head because every book I’ve ever read, every song I’ve ever heard, and every face I’ve ever seen are flashing through my mind all at once. Joys and fears chase each other around the forest that I’m missing for the trees, and I’m cutting trees down for fuel to keep enough light that – hopefully – the worst of the Dark Things don’t come. It’s chaos. Pure chaos. And it rages within your mind.

But an amazing thing sometimes happens.

There is a flip side to chaos, as any theorist in that field will tell you: patterns spontaneously coalesce from the storm, as the random yet specific memories and emotions come momentarily flying at you and cutting through you, carried by the currents of formless thought, will run into a similar thought, and click together for a few moments or minutes. What is amazing is that those spontaneous patterns, usually frail and fleeting, sometimes grow so vast that the entire maelstrom solidifies into an organized whole. Like a grain of crystal being dropped into a super-saturated solution. There are times when all a lifetime’s worth of thoughts are dancing and joking and laughing and fighting, when a sudden idea will flash across the swirling chaos like a comet; an incidental thought, seemingly at random. But all the books and songs and faces and memories will pause, look up, and see it. And be impressed. They get in line behind that thought, adding the weight of their reality to the wake of comet’s tail. Slowly at first, but then with greater speed, the angels’ song, the harmonies and melodies, fall into synch with the devils’ chanting and drumming, until you can’t tell them apart. All the competing impulses and compulsions find counterparts that arise from the dust, and align so perfectly with those counterparts that hopes and fears find a perfect balance among themselves. Your thoughts and emotions cancel each other out, leaving only you behind.

Your thoughts align, and for one second the universe as a whole unfolds before you and crystallizes in your mind in eleven dimensions. The weight and volume of every thought and memory come together, and take a single step forward as a combined and indescribable whole. You see everything you have ever seen, you know everything you have ever learned, you ARE everything you have EVER been. You see it all in a flash of lightning-light, and the thunder is a single beat of your heart as the entire universe of your mind comes together, and suddenly makes sense. Every thought, every memory, and every emotion come together, and – as one – crash into you and through you like a freight train.

It’s there, you see, and it’s gone – all in an instant.

The crystalline pattern of everyone and everything, rather than fracturing back into random thoughts and memories, instead collapses completely from its own weight. Like the funnel of a tornado suddenly disappearing into nothing from a change in the wind, your thoughts dissolve, and fall into the dust from whence they formed. There is sudden, deafening silence. No more angels. No more demons. No more swirling thoughts. No more raging emotions. You find that the storm has spent its energy, and your mind is utterly still. In that moment, your mind, running wild and unchecked, devours itself, discovers itself, and comes to rest.

You find the calm on the other side of insanity.