Writer's Block

On being without a lot of thoughts

Readers will have noticed my silence for a few months. I should apologize for that. Life has been non-stop and all-consuming lately, with a growing family and a growing church music program that I oversee. A few months ago, I thought I was gearing up to activate paid subscriptions to my blogs, but then I went silent, and couldn’t justify it. My intellectual life seems to go through periods of intense productivity interspersed with periods of intense silence — and often, the latter cannot be overcome even when I feel the strong desire to reawaken my mind from its unproductive stupor.

My brain tends to be hyperactive. In the past, I have struggled with compulsive behaviors connected to this unstoppable brain activity. Sometimes that hyperactivity produces endless streams of thought which I cannot seem to stop from flowing out, and I am compelled to write them down, in blog form or in tweets or whatever. In the past, I have been accused of having “too many ideas,” so unrelenting was I in jumping from one thing to the next in an almost obsessive manner. But then, it all comes to a grinding halt, and I am stuck in a rut for who knows how long, and who knows when I’ll come out of it.

To be clear, my brain doesn’t cease being hyperactive in these ruts. For one thing, I have been extremely consumed, practically and intellectually, with my professional work as a church musician. So one might say that my intellectual life has largely migrated to music, and that’s partly true. But I still harbor a deep craving for ideas, what is conventionally known as the “intellectual life.” And I cannot seem to whet that craving. My brain also turns, hyperactively, to less fulfilling things, random scrolling, social media, and I can get no real rest that way. Meanwhile, I cannot find the patience for long reading or even for working out complex lines of theological argumentation that I do find technically fascinating. Things exhaust me quickly.

Being so hyperactive, I have always found that the cultivation of true inner silence is uniquely desirable but also uniquely difficult for me. I acknowledge that my failure to cultivate silence is partly my own fault, the effect of my own lack of discipline, the ease with which I am discouraged. It is also partly the effect of a mental compulsive disorder. But, in the broader picture, it indicates a mind uncomfortable with an inevitable component of the intellectual life itself: the unavoidable moments when discursive thought must cease, and the mind must rest awhile in what it has discovered, without needing to discover more, until the time is right.

Perhaps this is just a personal problem, I would be interested to know what others experience in this regard, but I sometimes wonder whether my own intellectual life is hampered by a kind of addiction to discursive thought, which is only one form and not the noblest form of intellectual life; and whether I am effectively suffering the effects of withdrawal, grasping about for other forms of mental stimulation in the absence of the form that I crave most of all: hence the hyper-unproductive hyperactivity of my mind lately. I ought to learn to be comfortable with those moments, even if they are months-long, extended moments, of intellectual silence. That is what I really crave, but can never enjoy once life offers it to me directly, because I am interrupted by the addictive craving for discursive mental stimulation.

None of this reflection helps me know what to do about writer’s block.

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