My own world

Last night, as I went to bed, I pulled out Henri Nouwen's "Reaching Out" again. The page I struck the book open to had him describing something that sounded very much like my reality. He says rather than living in things the way they are, we invent a world of abstractions, of preooccupations to fill in the spaces that are unoccupied in our minds. He says we prefer a bad certainty to a good uncertainty.

I have to admit that he is at least describing me. I think of Dr. Temple Grandin, the autistic woman who became a specialist in animal behaviour after realizing that autism's unabstracted pictoral thinking is comparable to how animals see the world. My cat does not see the world through a haze of overthinking it - he just sees the world, which is why his head turns for every movement in the room.

How do you free yourself from this? Nouwen asserts that in some ways filling the empty space with preoccupations limits our creativity. As I lay staring at the plaster on the ceiling, the tree branch outside the window, the light cast by the lamps outside, I tried to empty my mind of conclusions, of words, and lie there in wordless observation. I was able to do it, for a while. But I could not fall asleep that way - I had to retreat into my abstractions, the scenarios that rattle about my head, before I could fall asleep.