“Wandering Mind”
.The mind wanders around and around. It might be in a maze, for often the spaces look eerily familiar. The paths seem different, the distinction between path and destination murky.
The quest is for something new. Something that seems perfect for a brief bright glowing moment. Something that looks fascinatingly full of potential, potential shaped enough to snare but not so shaped as to dismay with specifics.
The mind yearns for such an encounter, for the bliss of absorption, challenge, and distraction all rolled into one. For the absence, or at least recession, of worry and stress and anxiety during consumption. For the fleeting brush with the possibility of fulfillment.
Which branch to take? They begin to seem well-worn, uncomfortably familiar, and the things on them re-treads of old concepts. Where is the new thing, the exciting thing? Where is the alluring fruit of others’ creativity—creativity attuned enough but not too closely with the mind’s own?
If it’s not there, what about there? Or perhaps within. Within, but not too far down. Again, the mind seeks a balance: not something on its own surface, for its own surface is too well known to it, but not something deep inside, for the muddle there is daunting. Between these must be something shiny and shining, something with at least the appearance of profundity.
Profundity, and novelty. Novelty, and cleverness. A sufficient challenge to mine and shape without making either of those things arduous.
There. A half-formed idea, one that can be brought into a pleasingly new form, near the surface. Both its formation and its output will be superficially challenging, enough to briefly satisfy. The mind digs, prods, shapes, has its moments of forgetting itself in the process.
Something new, briefly brightly aglow with potential.
The mind wanders around and around.
[300 words]