My brain: Here’s a lettuce. A potter’s wheel. A pie chart. A cactus. Some bottles. A few tumblers. And, obviously, an insignia.
I sometimes wonder if my mind during meditation is practising a form of non-linear editing.
I sit down for a mindfulness session on Headspace, close my eyes and wait for the thoughts to settle. Instead, my brain cuts from a lettuce to a potter’s wheel, from a pie chart to a cactus, then bottles, tumblers, insignia and goodness knows what else.
There is no chronology, no plot and certainly no editorial discipline.
It reminds me of films such as 21 Grams, where the story is deliberately assembled out of fragments rather than told in a straight line. Or the stream of consciousness of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where one thought can tumble into another with seemingly no obligation to explain how it got there.
Except Joyce was doing it deliberately.
My brain does it while I’m trying to meditate.
Take 21 Grams, for instance. I can be thinking about its non-linear narrative and somehow my mind takes a completely unnecessary detour to Naomi Watts’s breasts. No segue. No justification. Just there.
Perhaps this is my own little stream of consciousness: a cornucopia of non-germane things, edited entirely by an unreliable director.
har-ish 
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