This month I am teaching a workshop at Keystone College in Pennsylvania called “The Trouble With Brains.” I took the title from an old Tom Tomorrow cartoon whose basic gist is that while we profess to be in complete control of our brain at all times, the truth is that it functions without conscious input from us much of the time. As evidence, the cartoon depicts people suffering from the earworm “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” but in an attempt to appear in command, insisting they find it ” poignant, yet uplifting.”
The aim of my workshop is to help creatives (mainly writers, but other, less miserable people as well) move past distraction and/or stuckness in their work. To that end, I came up with a list of things to discuss – events, circumstances, ways of thinking – that hamper us in our chosen work.
It was frighteningly easy for me to come up with 20 serious distractions and obstacles right off the top of my head, from the fundamental (“you have too few ideas”) to the medically indicated (“you are depressed and need treatment”). It was a list my writers group found alarmingly robust and warned me against presenting in full, lest people leave with a sense of doom. It’s possible they’re right. Just as a hypochondriac studying a medical journal thinks herself suddenly riddled with disease, my own workshop notes left me feeling so hopelessly frustrated and stuck, I had trouble completing it.
The late writer David Foster Wallace warned about the importance of learning to manage our thoughts. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” he said. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
My workshop is trying to be about exactly this: learning to exercise control over how we think. Many of my “solutions” to distraction and stuckness are about changing perspective, examining priorities and recommitting to what we value in our creative work. All of the solutions have merit, in my estimation, but all require perseverance. I worry that people won’t like this, that what I need to deliver is a quick fix for the problem of a stuck or distracted brain.