I think in jumbles. Jumbles of words, jumbles of half-formed images, a vague sense of some feeling clambering its way to get out. I find myself floating in thought. Waves of priorities come to me: food (planning the day around meals), drink, obligations (“what do i have to get done today”), feelings (“I need to get outside”), a song I remember, having to use the bathroom, jokes and various silly things such as singing new pop songs operatically, random memes and stupid verbal tics (“matcha labubu performative male i am being a performative male with match labubu”), I could go on. And I will. Thinking is about going on, and going on means choosing. I don’t choose for the thoughts to come to me but I do have a choice on where to place focus. There is a camera in my head. I don’t control the power supply but I can zoom the lens, place the framing, maybe tweak things in different lighting.
Something that struck me in the David Foster Wallace “This is Water” speech was the idea of defaulting into the drudgery of negativity and selfishness and having to be proactive with your thinking/appreciating. I came to a similar realization years ago, and the talk re-ignited that memory in my mind. Six or seven years ago, I went to Anne’s house. Anne was an elderly member of the church I grew up in (I don’t really attend anymore). She was friends with my mom and me, and she needed help moving stuff as she was moving from Knoxville, Tennessee (my hometown) to Raleigh, North Carolina. Back then, my default was more negative and gloomy. My sister had just undergone a year of chemotherapy dealing with an aggressive but highly treatable form of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. She ended up being ok, but she suffered. I moved back home to help her and my parents. I was unemployed, or working odd jobs while sitting around my parents’ house and the hospital. I had no direction. I was not proactive but reactive to whatever task was needed in the moment. I was not happy. What am I even working for if shit can just happen anytime for no reason?
After I helped Anne move, we shared some tea and cookies. She said that I used to be happier and lighter in high school. I seemed more down now, sunk in negativity. I was shocked that she noticed that in me, or that my grandiose secret pain was not that secret and probably not that unique. I said that I was responding to the world or that the world seemed worse (don’t remember exactly but that feels like the general point). She said: positivity is a choice, something you have to work for and seek out. That was one of the more inspiring things I’ve experience. Thought often happens to us but we have some choice on what to do with it, what to act on, what to build off of. Every thought should be felt and processed but I can clean out the junk. At least some of it. If some gnawing thought or fear or neurosis sticks, there’s something deeper there in the ocean of the subconscious. But I can always float in the Right Now. And remember that things go on. That obligation will get met, that I will feed and nourish and clean myself, that I and everyone I love and everyone everywhere will keep aging.
I think of my mind as an aquarium. All sorts of thoughts, emotions, people, imaginations, visions, and memories swimming in and out of each other. Interacting with each other in various ways: mutualistic, parasitic, commensalism, repressed emotions and desires hiding under certain thoughts like a crab under a shell. The environment and the ether dumping stuff in that I’ll probably have to clean out at some point. All encompassed in whatever This Consciousness is. Probably some little song playing outside of it as I do some boring task. My consciousness is pretty nice, all things considered. A complete mystery but mundane and serves me decently. It really is like an interface then.
Ryan Rotella 
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