The Zen of the Chattering Mind

You know that one part of your brain that just never shuts up? The little voice that keeps going and going and going, every minute you’re awake?

Eastern philosophies refer to this chaotic part of our mind as “The Chattering Monkey,” and as one teacher puts it, we achieve wisdom by “sustaining awareness for as long as possible without interference from the monkey mind.”

(There might as well be a footnote to this teaching that says, “Good luck, Dale.” I feel like I’ve got a whole cage of hyper-active monkeys up there in my skull, not just one.)

I can’t help it. I was born with a one-track body and a hundred-track mind, and if I ever complete more than one percent of all the things I intend to do on an average day, but get distracted from, I feel like I’ve lucked out.

Okay, here’s an example... not long ago, we were heading up to Memphis for a book festival and listening to the Alabama game on the car radio. For some reason, my brain can focus better during a good football game than almost any other time, which is one more reason I look forward to autumn.

Anyhow, Kenny Stabler (one of the best commentators in the business, for my money) says about the Ole Miss quarterback, “That boy’s so quick, you couldn’t hem him up in a phone booth.” And after the Diet Coke spewed out of my nose and I finally quit laughing, my mind drifted off to phone booths and how rarely you see them, nowadays.

See, apparently so many people have cell phones that there’s not much money to be made in the phone booth business any more, especially what with vandalism and all.

Then my mind jumped back to August. when I had to report on a story in the Mississippi Delta. Once I got where I was going, the town was so small my cell phone had no reception at all and so I couldn’t use it to call any of the people I was supposed to meet and interview there. I had to find service-station phone booths instead, and the operators who connected the calls told me they were “independent service providers.”

Well, I was so busy I didn’t give any thought to what their rates might be, and when I got my next month’s phone bill I had a $90 charge for Mississippi phone calls from some company I’d never heard of. Which, getting back to football for a second, gave me yet one more good reason to hope Alabama stomped Ole Miss good.

But then one of the radio commercials during the football game had a saxophone solo in it, and that got me to thinking about Beale Street up in Memphis, where we were headed, and that beautiful song “Walking in Memphis” from a guy named Marc Cohn. It won him a Grammy, I think, back in 1991 if I remember correctly. What a great line, “I’m walking in Memphis, with my feet ten feet off of Beale…”

But, see, “Beale” sounded like “bill” and I remembered my August phone bill again and I got worried I’d have to use pay phones on this trip. But I checked my cell phone, and the signal stayed good and strong all the way up Highway 78 through Tupelo and beyond. So I’m thinking, one less thing to worry about, right?

Except that my new cell phone has Internet service too, and when I’m checking the sports scores on ESPN to see how Alabama and Ole Miss came out (we were out of radio range of Kenny and Eli by that time) I got distracted by an Internet headline about medical researchers in St. Louis who were teaching people with spinal cord injuries to play video games with no hands, just by using their brains.

And that got me to wondering if I’d live long enough to have a cell phone I could operate with my brain, and whether I could tame my monkeys enough to do it, and finally I just settled for living long enough to see Alabama find another wide receiver with the talent and heart of Tyrone Prothro, and thinking about him got me sad.

By that time we were in Memphis, but my brain was so tired from all its monkey-chattering on the drive up that we didn’t go to the book festival that night but found a motel instead, so we could hit the festival fresh the next morning.

If you’ve never tried to get a hundred chattering monkeys to sleep in a strange motel bed, you’ve missed a treat.

But that’s a story for another day. And another monkey.