Exhausted out of my wits, I sit here, forcing myself to think of nothing at all but the little worries, tiny scuffles and bits and pieces of things left undone plague me and sit around this chair, crowding and hovering over me as I sit here and try to force all thoughts out of myself. Then, like some adept yogi, it occurs to me that this is not the answer. But then, all that looks great in a book with a beautifully crafted cover or some film where someone is trying to find themselves, but on a normal day in a normal life, you genuinely want thoughtlessness at the end of it–not some insightful and intricate process of “watching your thoughts” as they call it. Not that I am against insightful and intricate processes, but I am against the bastardisation of ideas and the pimping out concepts which then find their way in colloquialisms and things people say to each other when they sit and talk. Every time you steal a sentence from a book, you lose an ounce of original thought. This is not to say you must not read or remember things. But only that you must watch very carefully what you decide to keep.
After all, there is nothing wrong with being exhausted or wanting to be rid of your thoughts for an hour. It is the most natural thing to want if you, like Atlas, carry the weight of your own world on your shoulders, like everyone else with a little bit of individual responsibility often does. There is nothing wrong with it, indeed. If you are like me, you can sit for about thirty minutes, which become two hours, and dump it all down on a sheet of paper or a screen or even a tissue at a bar. Yes, you could do that. It would be a thousand times better than preaching and regurgitating ideas, chewing them, grinding them, as if they were cud and you were cattle.