– To anyone whose mind never stops, but to whom fulfillment only comes if the thoughts affect an outcome of growth –

A thinker. Pondering incessantly, analyzing anything and everything, at all times. A mind difficult to shut off. For many years I found this constant thinking troublesome, mainly because the prevailing theme was that of a worrier.

With time, I have learned to adjust my thoughts into more constructive patterns. Lately, I’ve noticed I jump between three main themes: a dweller, a processor, and a preparer. As a dweller, my mind runs a pattern of rethinking the past. As a processor, it runs a pattern of deriving meaning and forms solutions for use in the present. As a preparer, it runs rehearsals for the future.

Here’s the thing: Although I’m normally in a state of constant thinking and analyzing, there are times my mind feels numb and other times when I feel stuck. For me, mental numbness occurs after sustained periods of burden or distress. This numbness seems to allow me to cope with hardships, and tends to resolve itself as conditions improve. On the other hand, for me, mental stuckness occurs as a result of sustained periods of living a day-in-day-out, rat-race grind: work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep. This stuckness (thinking in mental re-runs, where thoughts and situations repeat, where all the problems are familiar and unoriginal thought routines develop) is not reassuring or comforting. It is not, at all, what I want out of adulthood, to reach some sort of state where I stagnate as an individual. It is a rut, a thinker’s rut.

Not to be confused with writer’s block, I’m coining a thinker’s rut as being where the mind is stuck in a place absent of expansion or transformation. Unlike writer’s block, I can create content when stuck in a thinker’s rut. Using the infinite possible permutations of known language, I seem to always be able to create, but, when in a thinker’s rut I cannot grow. I cannot mature or feel enlightened; I can only feel accomplished. For a while, this feeling is enough. But the feeling of accomplishment can play tricks on you, giving the impression that growth is occurring, when in reality no change has occurred.

Because accomplishment is such an effective placebo, I almost always arrive in a rut months before I’ve realized it. The business of performing tasks and the satisfaction upon completing them spins off into an immediate cycle where I resume getting busy so I can resume getting the satisfaction. Somewhere after a few cycles, perhaps in a moment of dwelling, I uncover the reality that no growth has occurred, that my habits are the same, that my behaviors are the same, that my viewpoints on the world are the same. This sudden, acute awareness that I have stagnated, and am in fact in a thinker’s rut, operating robotically, accruing accomplishments without experiencing real growth, sends me spiraling into a tailspin, eager and desperate to regain liveliness and restore more constructive thinking patterns.

(Okay, so by now I should ask to please forgive the self-indulgent nature of coining a term, in an attempt to capture the essence of a problem so that others might understand.)

Before now, I could not articulate how this affliction differed from writer’s block, so I pursued many of the same treatments a stumped writer would pursue: change of environment (going on a trip, moving to a new residence), change of facade (new hair, new clothes), change of activity (new food, new adventure) hoping something would kick me out of my rut. Sure, these changes can work, but they can be costly, and, at some point, you burn through all of the obvious options. With age and after trying a wide array of options, you realize there aren’t many more, truly new environments, facades, and adventures within your geographic or financial reach.

A couple years ago, after a prolonged period of being stuck, I reached a point of feeling defeated, like I might never be able to come out of being stuck. Then, out of nowhere, something so simple and free showed up, something I never saw coming. As I observed an interview between a journalist and a citizen of Copenhagen, they spoke a word I’d never heard before, a word we don’t have or use in North America (the word happened to be Janteloven, but that’s another story.)

Studies have shown that our dreams and our thought patterns and our problem-solving can be limited by the limits of the words in our native language. If that is true, then in some ways our mental growth is limited by our language. If you think I’m about to say the cure to being in a rut is learning a new language, I’m not. That is not my point at all. Learning another language usually involves immersion in the most common words needed to operate, not the words for which we don’t have an equivalent. Those often remain the words you don’t learn or use, even after mastering a new language.

But those words, the words we don’t have an equivalent for, can be loaded with concepts we don’t have, concepts that can be leveraged to shed light on situations in completely new ways, jostling you right out of a rut by providing a framework within which things can be completely re-evaluated. Examining such a word was exactly what I needed to restore my active-thinker self and resume a constructive, growthful thinking.

For that reason, I’m would like to start a series called “Words We Don’t Have”, to share and examine unfamiliar words and concepts that helped me get out of a rut, feel less ignorant, and feel more connected to others.

–AmberNobody