Before our critique sessions we normally have a bit of quiet so that we can de-compress and bring ourselves back to ourselves and some sense of sanity and one thing I remember Jamie saying is that from time-to-time we should think about nothing which I have tried to do since she recommended it and the closest I seem to get to thinking about nothing is when I wake up on the weekends and try to stay quiet and think about nothing but then I start looking around the room and I look at my two framed theater programs and I start thinking about The Phantom of the Opera and my trips to England so then I force myself to look somewhere else and I look at my closed window blinds which should be boring enough to help me think of nothing except that I think about what is beyond the window which is my yard and I think about all of the things that need to be done in the yard like watering, weeding, laying down pavers, cleaning the almost- certain raccoon poop out of the birdbaths and Oliver who is probably poised in front of my patio door wondering where breakfast is and my clothesline is outside of my window too, and that brings to mind stripping the bed, gathering the towels, plopping them all into my laundry basket, grabbing the dish cloth and towel on my way to the laundry room and getting the washing started and if I go into the laundry room I will know for certain that the cat pan needs cleaning so the boring window blind becomes exhausting and I look at the Gustav Klimt reproductions that are framed and hanging on the south wall next to the window blind and I think about the Art History classes I took and how cool it would be to see The Kiss for real and then I catch myself not thinking about nothing so I roll over in bed and now I’m facing my closet where I take an immediate inventory of things that I wear in the summer, things I wear in cooler weather, things I wear once in a while during the few chilly days and the stuff that hangs there year after year that I should have left in Minnesota but were too new to leave behind and maybe I’ll go to Minnesota in the winter and then I’ll need to pack some of these things and it will save me some money because I’ll already have them and I won’t have to go out and buy new and then there’s some stuff that should have gone to Goodwill a long time ago and when I have time I need to sort through and box up the Goodwill stuff and reorganize the rest so I’m not always looking at the Minnesota clothes that I hardly ever wear and I know it’s there but can’t see my mother’s dark green velvet wedding dress that for some reason I am the guardian over and I remember asking her why she wore a colored dress for her wedding and she told me that in those days you bought a dress that you could wear more than once and I close my eyes and think about a picture I have of her wearing the dress and I think about how much I miss her and I calculate how many years it’s been since she passed away and how hard it was to let her go and then I realize I’ve made a visual trip around my room thinking about all sorts of wonderful, memorable things when I was supposed to be thinking about nothing.
Image: “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt
Every Day Writer 