What I learned today

I’ve learned something astonishing.

I’ve been having some difficulties concentrating. Nothing horrible, just a lack of the focus that I’m used to having. My thoughts wander, and I find it difficult to apply myself with the self-brutalizing intensity that I expect from myself. Yoga seems to help, so I’m practicing again. There would seem to be no problem, since I found a treatment without weeks of soul searching and agonizing.

Which doesn’t keep me from thinking about it; puzzling out behavior is what I do.

I was considering the phenomenon, and noted that, counter-intuitively, my concentration was actually better when I was frequently depressed, highly stressed, and stretched far too thin. Hmph, I mused, it’s almost as if I should return to being depressed. The constant awareness of my doom and pathos was focussing.

I was dumbstruck at the thought.

Of course it was focussing. That’s what behavioral (as opposed to chemical) depression is; either a constant meditation or a state of functional hypnosis.

I’m not in that trance anymore, and haven’t entered a more healthful altered state – rut, for instance, or piety, or any number of others. Without practice, concentration (like any learned behavior) becomes dulled with unuse.

Behavioral depression is an altered state of consciousness or a meditation (which may be a sort of the same thing).

How bizzare.