This week’s episodes are guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

So often my mind feels crowded. Busy. Like a rush hour intersection of internal monologue. I’ve felt this way since I was a child, but the obligations of adulthood and the relentless pace of media have not helped the situation.

And I’ve noticed something curious happening when I’m feeling overwhelmed, especially when that overwhelm is due to incoming emails or an expanding to-do list: I’m reaching for my phone to scroll. Yet that isn’t less noise. It’s more noise. More distraction. A junkier version of stimulation, being fed to me instead of originating from my thoughts.

I’ve tried lots of strategies. I’m still trying new strategies. Blocking out focus time, tweaking notifications, using restrictions. My favorite strategy is keeping an art book on my desk. When I feel the desire to distract from the onslaught, or when I hit a mental block, I open up the book to a random painting. I don’t stop thinking; I change the shape of my thinking — by looking at art and avoiding words for a moment.

Today’s poem does that too — bends the shape of thinking — by forming a lyric collage.

Stop Thinking & End Your Problems
by Elisa Gabbert

I met a woman with a tumor in her language center. She
would think about what she wanted to say, then hear her 
thought in the voice of the person she was talking to, so it 
felt like they were reading her mind. 

I think there is a name for this, but can’t remember what 
it is.

I think “clarity” is kind of a poorly defined idea. 

I think it would still work with more distance. 

I think I pray a lot now; prayer just isn’t what I thought
it was.

Whether or not I believe in God (I don’t), “God” is so
useful, as language. I can’t think without the word God.

I think we expect too much of people, who are mostly
suffering and confused. 

I think we make the mistake of thinking that “history” is
truer than experience is true. 

I think “grateful to be alive” is a feeling you can maintain
for one or two days, tops.

I think every well-meaning critique-of-war film will
eventually turn into “explosions look beautiful.”

I think if you read a poem, then forget you’ve read it, and
then much later you read it again, it really does get better.

I think maybe sadness and happiness are alike, but
unhappiness is different.

I think pleasure is a basic human need, but eating isn’t
resistance,  we just need to eat.

If you order hot tea in a restaurant, I automatically think
you’re not very fun. 

Crying must release endorphins or something. I wish I
could cry for longer. 

I think panic is a decent strategy. 

I think of it as a very dramatic form of giving up.

I think it’s hard not to experience your life as a thing that
happens to  you.

I think it’s fooling yourself into thinking you’re thinking.

I do all this mental preparing to the point I think it already
happened. 

I think it’s largely unconscious, feels like a collective
decision, not a chain of events. 

I think it’s philosophical and physical and have not gotten
a good answer.

Everything reminds me of it, but I don’t know what “it” is. 

“Stop Thinking & End Your Problems” by Elisa Gabbert, from NORMAL DISTANCE, copyright © 2022, Elisa Gabbert. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint Press.