June 26, 2018

Greetings from where I got off,

There is a condition most of you are familiar with but probably have ignored, or more likely, forgotten about.  It is best referred to as The Fleeting Thought.

Before we go too deep, I will explain I am not talking about a serious malady such as amnesia or ADD or Alzheimer’s. (Which, by the way, no two people in a row will pronounce the same way, but I digress.) 

Writers in particular are afflicted with this condition.  If anyone made a study (no one has, I checked) to observe the average writer you would find them staring into space for long periods of time.  If asked, (no one has, I checked) the writer would explain he/she is thinking, or more dramatically, ‘creating’.  In truth they are trying to remember what they sat down to write.

This kind of space staring and occasionally the beginning of an interesting sentence is inspired by The Fleeting Thought.  A brilliant idea, sometimes fully formed, with footnotes, appears in the brain, usually unbidden.  The writer, thinking this is inspiration from their muse, quickly writes out the words, just knowing that this will lead to something amazing.  Sadly, no writer can produce the words faster than they can vanish.  Hence the ‘fleet’ in The Fleeting Thought.

Normal people (by which I mean non-writers) are also victims of The Fleeting Thought.  Everyone has started a sentence that led to a derailment they could not quite recover from. 
 Or you had something on the tip of your tongue, felt strongly compelled to share it and couldn’t get past ‘Umm…I ..’

Scientists have studied this phenomenon for decades but virtually all of them lost interest when they couldn’t put their finger on what they came into the laboratory for, and went to work on something else.  A few focused individuals produced studies on The Fleeting Thought and then prescribed a series of electrical shocks interspersed with leeches as a cure.

The Fleeting Thought is less about what we forgot and more about what we are given.  There is something created in your mind and ready to be shared, you know it, you act on it.  And then you lose your train of thought.  You see it flying on the track, steam and steel and locomotion, churning across the dramatic ravine onto the trestle and rushing across the tree lined hill and then it vanishes and you are left with an image of your third grade teacher whose name you can’t remember. 

There are a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon.  Some might include the words ‘synapses’ or ‘prefrontal cortex’ or ‘brain-fart’.  These are merely distractions from what is probably the truth.  Which you will recognize in the next paragraph, assuming I can recall it long enough to share.

When we leave this life and journey into whatever astral plane awaits, we are not finished expressing ourselves.  Most of it consists of the snappy comebacks we wish we would have said when playing dodgeball that one time or when we got teased because we couldn’t back up a trailer.  But there are also beautiful expressions of love and wonderful ideas for breakfast and great rhymes and awesome song lyrics and the perfect sentence to describe grass stains.

And so we spend generations haunting the earth, hovering near those still living and whispering these bits of genius into their subconscious.  But it is not a perfect system, there are wavelength issues still to be worked out.  There is no app for any of this, I checked.

And so occasionally we who are still in this world will be given the words from those in the next and it might seem like enough.  We plunge ahead, determined to inspire or change or amuse, and we almost make it, and then are left with Mrs. Ahearn.  (Who I am pretty sure was my third grade teacher.)

At the point of derailment we have a choice; either admit we have no idea what we were going to say, or fill in with whatever we can patch together in the moment.  Which is what I did this morning.



Hope this finds you plunging ahead,

David