A friend recently told me that he experiences his mind as somewhat like a train station. He thinks of his mental clarity as being about 1) how many trains of thought he can have going at once and 2) how often he loses a train of thought to a blank mind. When he’s in a good flow state, he can have all ~3 trains running, and rarely loses a thought. The train station is bustling, relevant cars are connected in ways that make sense and the trains have clear destinations. When he has a hard time concentrating, individual train cars might bump around but they’re not hooked together and have no direction, more like an abandoned rail yard.
This fascinated me, both because I really liked his description of his experience inside of his own head using a physical metaphor and also because this is not at all how I experience my own mind.
My physical representation of the inner workings of my mind is something more like this: imagine Galadriel at her mirror, or three witches clustered over a cauldron. I am somehow both Galadriel/all 3 witches AND the pool/cauldron. Usually to get clear thoughts, I need to get things started by doing a ritual (dramatically pouring water into a stone basin) or providing ingredients (newt’s eye, frogs toe, an interesting article I just read, etc.). When I’m in a flow state, the embodied version of my “self” recedes and I become focused on the vessel and its contents.
For me, the work of thinking is more about conjuring than it is about making neatly connected trains and following them to their conclusions. If I ask the right question of the vessel and provide the right combination of elements, either a clear vision or a more cryptic set of phrases, signs, and symbols will appear. I have some basic recipes that I’ve found work well, and while I generally start with these I frequently have to make adjustments and experiment with additional garnishes to get something that works really well for a given situation.
When I have good mental clarity, ideas present themselves to me in a way that’s easily digestible, almost like watching TV. It never feels like work, it feels you’ve tuned in to something that was already there. Sometimes I just need to somehow be in the right mood/situation and a clear, compelling thought will spontaneously be presented to me. Other times I do all the right things and all I get back are signs so cryptic they’re practically gibberish. If I’m distracted, I might still be receiving signs, but there are also things going on in the surrounding forest that distract me. When I have a really hard time concentrating, I’m not even engaging with the pool/cauldron, I’ve wandered off and am picking berries or something.
Just as my friend’s experience of his mind sounded strange and foreign to me, I expect many others will not resonate with my experience either. I imagine there are infinitely many ways people conceptualize and describe their experience of thought.
What physical metaphor would you use to describe your experience of mental clarity?