It’s time for a break, to do the laundry and wash my brain before unfolding the labyrinth of patterns that risk leaving creases in places they don’t belong. I’m entertaining the notion of languishing in a space of mindlessness, just drifting along on an open sea where analytical calm prevails, and thought currents have slowed. I can’t say I’ve been traveling deep within revelatory crevasses or discovered much new about myself as much as I’ve massaged the fabric of familiarity that allows things to fit in evermore comfortable ways hitherto familiar, yet not.

How does one find intentional boredom, which often seems elusive while otherwise showing at inopportune times when wishes for boredom were the furthest things from one’s mind? To sit down at a coffee shop with nothing to do, desiring to find nothing to say, only half considering the reading of a book because the real goal is to sit still and merely observe. But no, that brain abhorring the vacuum I’m trying to cultivate gets to work populating threads and streams with fragments of non-sequiturs and hoped-for mixed metaphors that are best left forgotten.

And then, just like that, the hour dilates due to a glitch in the matrix of someone else’s memory, and I find myself with an additional two empty hours. Striving to keep thoughts of action at bay, I try hard not to stare at possibilities but instead hold steady, rowing into my yearning for nothing. After all, what’s wrong with just sitting here playing word spaghetti with sentences that will challenge my wife to discover if my gobbledygook actually means anything?

You might never know it, but one hundred minutes have passed, and even more than that will have gone by before I was able to place a period at the end of this sentence. Then there will be the elapsed time between then and now when whatever immaterial string of words, falling short of sharing deeper anything-ness, will slowly appear, but to what end? Filler? Consider that my objective is not a Hegelian chore but may as well be characterized as a Sisyphusian uphill rock toss, a kind of coffee shop version of cornhole where the bags/rock are thought fragments culled from a languid mind failing to engage in the profound. And then, just like that, blam, we approach the two-hour mark, and I’ve conquered another paragraph demonstrating my unfolding of nothing.

Considering this last proposition, I suppose I have to admit failure as true success could only have been had if I were still staring at a blank page, or better yet, I’d fixed my gaze on some unfocused point on a horizon where a blur of indistinctness was washing thoughts off the cliff of observation. Where does one find this state of pure being with a truly empty mind?