A brain down the tube

I was going to write about this last night, but every time I tried start­ing, the words just wouldn’t hap­pen. Let’s see what occurs this time.

I often have minor rev­el­a­tions while trav­el­ling on the Lon­don Under­ground. Even though my tube jour­ney between home and work is only ten minutes or so, it’s amaz­ing what thoughts go through my mind in that rel­at­ively short space of time. Yes­ter­day even­ing, as I was trav­el­ling home in a fairly empty car­riage, I couldn’t help over­hear­ing the two women oppos­ite me. I reckon they were post­gradu­ate stu­dents, and they were obvi­ously dis­cuss­ing some research they were doing. It was a soci­olo­gical topic — more than that I can’t be cer­tain of. But what imme­di­ately struck me was their enthu­si­asm for talk­ing about big, com­plex ideas.

And I sud­denly felt really, really stupid.

A few days ago, I men­tioned how I increas­ingly hate the fact that I can seem­ingly go for days without invest­ig­at­ing news, without know­ing what’s going on in the wider world. And I used to con­sider myself so aware of social issues, polit­ics, world events, whatever you call it. In the same way, listen­ing to these two people talk­ing on the tube train, I sud­denly real­ised (and I know this sounds incred­ibly pre­ten­tious), that it has been simply ages since I’ve taken part in an ana­lyt­ical dis­cus­sion like this — a dis­cus­sion which really chal­lenges my brain, changes my pre­con­cep­tions, makes me think laterally.

I’m aware of the many thoughts that chal­lenge my mind (the emo­tional part of my brain) — indeed, as I’ve men­tioned here before, unfor­tu­nately I often tend to be the type of per­son who is a bit too emo­tional and tends to turn things over in my mind too much. And, of course, there are the daily pro­cesses that my brain, your brain and everyone’s brain goes through every day (from know­ing which shoe goes on which foot, to being able to read a train timetable). I’m not say­ing, either, that I live a life totally devoid of any intel­li­gent dis­cus­sion — I get to hear a lot of inter­est­ing and some­times damn pro­found ideas. But it does tend to be quite insu­lar, con­cerned with one’s wider circle of acquaint­ances and imme­di­ate environment.

It’s when I’m chal­lenged to think more deeply and really use my ana­lyt­ical brain that I really come unstuck. Here are two recent examples. If you’ve been read­ing Wherever You Are a long time, you may remem­ber the slight saga I had over get­ting hold of a copy of Naomi Klein’s book on anti-corporatism, No Logo, and being keen to read it after all the plaudits it had received. Well, I’ve had the book for a good two months now, and I’ve only just fin­ished the intro­duc­tion. At the moment, it all seems just far too com­plex and full of ideas for me to get my head around. I have failed to per­severe with it. And the second example? A couple of days ago, in our office, a dis­cus­sion star­ted about the planned Lon­don Under­ground strikes in Feb­ru­ary. A couple of years ago, I would have dived in there with my forth­right views about whether or not the strike should hap­pen. But instead, I came out with some fairly flip­pant and ridicu­lous com­ment (I don’t recall the details), which tem­por­ar­ily pissed off the col­league who had star­ted the dis­cus­sion. Need­less to say, I then retired back under my head­phones with embarrassment.

I real­ise how utterly pre­ten­tious and self-obsessed this all sounds, and I don’t really know where it’s going. But you wouldn’t come here if you wanted beautifully-formed writ­ing with a begin­ning, middle and an end, and with a spe­cific point to make. Maybe the time has come to put my brain back into train­ing again, and start think­ing a bit longer, deeper and further.