My grandmother Mary O’Hare is like an Irish fairy Godmother who flutters into our home on occasion to nurture neglected plant life and fill up our bird feeders. She comes over about twice a week to make the rounds: first, she gives all three dogs a treat. Then she fills two bird feeders and waters all of our houseplants. If it's the right time of year, she goes out and tends to the garden. She asks how each member of the family is doing and offers natural remedies if any of us should be struggling with a particular ailment.
One day she comes to help me clean out our fridge. The refrigerator is in need of urgent care, so it requires the work of at least two people to really get it clean.
She and I begin to de-clutter, scrub, and organize, and my mind travels in and out of our conversation as I think about language and an uncluttered mind.
Language –– words, the arrangement of words, grammar, the imperfect quality of this device for truly expressing thought –– thrills and stumps me. I'm always thinking about it.
But even language must be appreciated in moderation –– too much of it disrupts our balance. How can we move beyond language, though, and is it even possible to do so?
Language is an interpretive tool that we use to communicate with the world outside of our minds. Is there a non-linguistic space that exists beyond thought, or will language always interfere with our ability to just be?
When I process thought, my thoughts automatically translate themselves into English words. When dogs think, I wonder if they think in images. Maybe their thoughts automatically translate to various subconscious tonal barks. Sometimes my thoughts flash in images, but even those images are often accompanied by a worded expression of the underlying sentiment being expressed (pain, grief, joy, etc.).
Many of us identify 100% with our thinking minds. It’s hard not to when we have so many thoughts. On average, in fact, we have between 50,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day, which means that we have between 35-48 thoughts per minute (Bruce Davis, Ph.D, Huffington Post, 2013). We easily become products of our persistent perceptions; we're victims of our interpretive prisons. But thoughts, language, innovation, worry, planning, processing, and reflection are only many different aspects of one component of the totality of our true selves.
When we de-clutter a refrigerator, we remove the items it holds inside of it. When the fridge is empty, however, it doesn’t stop being a fridge – much like when we empty our thoughts, our core selves still remain in tact. In fact, the fridge probably runs more smoothly (and definitely smells a lot better) when it’s free of all the garbage. Without a doubt, when the contents of a fridge have been simplified and organized, the items inside it are then much easier to find.
I would hope the same concept applies when we show compassion to the components of our mind. If the volume of our inner language is turned down for even a short period of time each day, I would hope that it would intensify the quality and accessibility of the items contained within it.
