CHAPTER 12
Self-Help for Neurons
How can you release your billions of neurons from their slavish grip on remembering your brother-in-law’s telephone number and your favorite color? Well, first the idea has to make sense to you. You have to agree with my contention that knowing the birthdates of everyone in your family, down to Cousin Marvin and Aunt Rose, costs you whole books and whole decades of your writing life.
You have to recognize the following: that minding a worry as if you are minding an infant, such that the worry is never far from consciousness and losing sight of it for an instant causes you to start scurrying around the apartment searching for it, is not some innocent neurotic handicap but a complete self-theft program. It is the perfect way to steal billions of neurons from your meager many billions, leaving you stupider and less imaginative. How clever is that?
It is time to stop giving away billions of your neurons to task maintenance, memory maintenance, and worry maintenance. Isn’t it?
It is one thing to have a worry when it is appropriate to have a worry. The day before your Nobel Prize acceptance speech, it is appropriate to put in for a wake-up call and to worry that your request hasn’t quite registered in the eyes of the handsome Swedish desk clerk. Given your worry, you say, “Did you get that? I need to get up tomorrow. The king is expecting me.” Experience teaches us whether or not the quality of the clerk’s response reassures us or continues to worry us. If it continues to worry us, we sidle down the counter to another clerk, smile, and exclaim, “I need a wake-up call tomorrow at five A.M.! Can you help me?” We continue smiling when she pushes a few buttons and curtly replies, “Sir, that has been taken care of!”
Then we forget about it.
If we’ve been worried about that wake-up call for the three months leading up to Stockholm, we probably haven’t written our acceptance speech yet, and shame on us! On the other hand, if we know perfectly well that there are plenty of things to worry about, from today’s gulag to the escalating price of tangerines, but refuse to turn over a single neuron to mere unproductive worry, then we’ll have sufficient neurons available to write a really excellent acceptance speech, like the one Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, so fine a speech that it is available in paperback.
A famous Zen parable, slightly mangled in the retelling, goes as follows. Master and disciple are out walking. They come to a deep, fast-rushing stream and encounter a damsel in distress who, perhaps because she prefers not to get her skirt wet, is stuck on this side of the stream. She asks the master to carry her across. Because of the ascetic tradition that they practice, the disciple presumes that the master will say no.
Lo and behold, the master agrees and carries her across. Master and disciple proceed on their merry way, the disciple brooding about (or envious of) the fact that his teacher got to touch a lady. Back at the monastery, the disciple confronts the master, exclaiming, “How could you do that? We are expressly forbidden to touch a woman!” The master smiles benignly (or else whacks him with a stick—I forget) and replies, “Are you still thinking about that woman? I left her at the riverbank and look, you are still carrying her around!”
The master can get on with his next haiku. His student, by contrast, seems doomed—until he is enlightened, or just a little smarter—to turn over billions of his neurons to brooding about his master’s conduct and parsing the distinction between an injunction against touching and the offer of a helping hand. Probably another few billion neurons will get devoted to fantasizing about that woman. The disciple is unable to empty his mind, a task that is the exact equivalent of returning neurons to the fold.
A free neuron, unencumbered by the demand to do a bit of work—to connect with his buddies in the service of remembering how many husbands a certain celebrity has cycled through or to link in a sad daisy chain of remembrance about the time we didn’t get that red bicycle—is an available neuron, quiet as a church mouse: hence the experience of profound silence that comes with “quiet mind.” Get all your neurons back and, voilà! you have silence, presence, and the sort of mind space that attracts leaps of imagination.
Too many stolen neurons and you aren’t actually present. Oh, sure, you look like a writer, sitting there in front of your computer, chewing on your nail and playing with a swell Italian word whose lilt charms you. But it is only your body and a too-small percentage of your brain that you’ve brought to the task. It is like coming to a singing contest with half a vocal cord or to an eating contest with your stomach stapled. You look fine to the judges, who may even peg you for a favorite, but you don’t stand a chance.
The essence of presence is freeing neurons. You say that you are intending to write, and certainly part of you means that. But a billion neurons are gripping the weather forecast. Another billion are holding your upset about eating (or not eating) breakfast. Another billion—no, several!—are infamously linked to remind you that the first sentence you write today will prove that you are an idiot and an imposter. Virtually every neuron you own is already charged with some task and the remaining few can’t help but whimper, “You want us to dream up a great novel?”
It is hard to say where you are, neuronally speaking, when you deliver over billions of your neurons to unnecessary facts, sneaky feelings, and mounds of fluff and nonsense. But it’s not ready to write. Of course, you can still write, just as the world’s work force can send e-mails all day long even though trillions of their neurons are elsewhere. But that is not our kind of writing. That is not the writing you fell down on your knees in front of when you happened upon a good book. To do our writing, you need those neurons back. You may have sent them away, but now you must recall them in all seriousness.
LESSON 12
There is some delicate, delectable material up there in your head, neurons and synapses and neural transmitters and all sorts of fancy machinery that the universe has gone to a lot of trouble to create for writers. Don’t waste it by turning neurons over to tasks that are the equivalent of getting your socks matched. Every freed neuron is a tiny fraction of a great idea and you—and only you—are its liberator.
To Do
1. Forget your brother-in-law’s phone number. You’ve got it stored in your electronic address book, don’t you? Get back 163,000,000 neurons right there.
2. Practice letting thoughts not only come but go. Think “Weeds in the garden” and let the thought, the sting, the command, the demand, the big drama around weeds just evaporate. Don’t give a billion of your stray neurons even a nanosecond to join hands and create the mischief of a guilt trip.
3. Remember your wife’s birthday but forget your own. Do you really care when you were born? Isn’t it more important to care about being alive? Make strict choices about where you will employ neurons. When something comes up, ask yourself “Is that worth three billion neurons?”
4. Get a grip on your mind, which means helping neurons surrender their iron grip. Isn’t that a charming paradox?