Sideways Mind

A friend of mine coined this term one night as we sat in her kitchen drinking frighteningly strong margaritas and talking trash till 5 am and I immediately recognized myself in it. She was talking about the sideways stilted mind. You know the one: that mind we just can't understand no matter how hard we try, the one that continually eludes us as we try to comprehend why other people do the things they do, the one that slips away every time we try to grasp it.

Now, I don't know for sure of I recognize myself in the sideways stilted mind, though I am sure many who have tried to figure out why I do the things I do would recognize me, but I do recognize myself in the sideways mind. The one that just doesn't go about things the way others think it should. The one that can figure out the answer to the math problem but can't show the work. The one that reaches it's goals through a hundred thousand mini-steps rather than an orderly progression. The one that gets distracted for hours by the way a subtle slant of light changes the look of the rocks on the living room table.

Never having been a linear thinker, I have found ways to work with my mind instead of against it. I have convinced myself that it is okay to start in the middle, or even at the end, and work my way back or around or through the problem. It is even okay to skip steps I was taught were essential, that sometimes I just don't need them. I have finally convinced myself that there is no right way to do things. While this took up several years of my adult life, I have found since then that I enjoy my sideways mind. In fact, I don't know what I'd do without it.

The very fact that my mind works the way it does is what makes me who I am. I wouldn't see the things I do if I were a straightforward thinker. My mind would be on getting to my destination rather than on stopping to take pictures of this amazing rock along the side of the road: the one with wild grasses growing alongside it, which has been blown down by the wind and now seem to form the grass and rock into nature's rendition of the ying-yang: browngreen grass as one half/grayblack rock the other. I wouldn't become so absorbed in my writing or drawing that time became irrelevant, that sleep became secondary.

I have learned to appreciate my sideways mind. And while it is true that there are many people in my life who just cannot fathom why I do the things I do, it's also true that I don't get them either. I guess without personal dictionaries which we can carry with us detailing all our hang ups and defining all our abstractions, we will have to keep communicating with each other as best we can: the sideways and the stilted mind, the orderly and structured, the erratic and sublime. And that's half the fun of it (and half the horror).