Hitting a pause, differently

I indulged my vagrant thoughts to find a way through the fog

It’s been a slow week, and I have struggled to get tasks started. One of these mornings, when caffeine deprivation heightened the mind’s blankness, I procrastinated by changing the ink cartridge in my fountain pen. Since I had replaced a black cartridge with a blue one, I whipped out a diary with nice paper and wrote four pages in cursive, watching with pleasure as the black turned to a grey, then to blue-grey. I wrote about how fountain pens featured large in my teenage memories and about a boy who had once impressed me with his fountain pen collection on our first date. I still remember him for his trademark turquoise blue ink, which had sent me into a phase of ink colour experimentation, too.

But even after writing those pages, the ink did not turn the royal blue it was supposed to. So I opened my sketchbook. Starting at the top of a blank page, I proceeded to let the lines flow. Without lifting the fountain pen from the page even once, I filled the entire page with lines. This is what emerged.

Surprised and amused by what I had drawn, I clicked a picture and sent it to my teen daughter. “That’s deep! Love it!” she texted back immediately (kids can be great for the ego!). So I looked at my doodle again.

What triggered this apparent profundity? Indulge me as I try to imagine what my subconsciousness was exploring that morning.

We find ourselves trapped in relentless rhythms. Life events and quotidian thoughts continue to occur in total disregard of my present state of mental paralysis.

Is it pain that lurks behind these inadvertent pauses? Pain that lives deep inside my cells wilfully buried but always seeking escape, seeking to be confronted, even understood. While resilience, its fraternal twin, takes strength from the rhythms of life and allows for continuity and rejuvenation.

Is it the sameness of the urban landscapes around me that dulls my mind? Multi-storey apartments, squat mundane homes, glass-clad office structures, and endless networks of highways, elevated roads, underpasses, and flyovers. The same mishmash of chain stores and beauty salons, and a motley mix of chemists, real estate brokerage firms and food stalls, no matter where you go. I know that a flat white at my usual cafe will do the trick and get me out of this hole, but really, is that all there is to this business of life - stop and go, stop and go?

Or is it exhaustion? From a never-ending toxic news cycle that feels futile yet addictive. Am I exploring if withdrawal is possible? Can it really free me so I can be more like who I want to be? Should I stay here, in this weirdly frozen moment, savour it instead of fighting it? Is that why I did not drink that coffee today?

Eventually, the thaw did happen, as it always does. But perhaps for the very first time, I let myself enjoy the fog. I let it wash over me. I dug into it. I was relaxed, then defiant, then amused by my own writing block. I procrastinated creatively, lightly, enjoyably. Drawings, paper cuttings, music, naps, swims and daydreams helped me break the rhythm and abandon the routine. And eventually I got stuff done.

I have little hope of being able to repeat this indulgent, meandering approach to coming unstuck, but I wish I could. I know I will go back to the usual tactics: to-do lists, Pomodoro timers, and constructing unnecessary external deadlines because creating structure has been my recipe for productivity for a very long time; without structure, I am lost and aimless. So I am recording for posterity this experience of wandering through rather than jumping over the mental fog. At the very least, this experiment has made me smile. I hope you are smiling with me.