Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 39

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 39 Mind Viscous and Slow   

Woke up in early morning. Felt the impending torrents of work and social life that will entrain my mind when back in New York City. As I mentally previewed these coming attractions—or distractions, still a week away—it became forcefully obvious, once again, the extent to which the present moment contains contents based on circumstances and context. Though a few thoughts go back to childhood or are distant projections into future decades, most are formed by the circumstances and context of the near past and very near future.  

I hiked up the West Fork trail along the river to Three Mile Ruin. Once again, I swam in the spot where the water is bent ninety degrees by the sheer cliff face. Above, tucked into a cave reached only by a steep climb, the small cliff dwelling almost a thousand years old was like a mind behind an eye. 

We conform to the world in the way that a stream’s flow is shaped to its banks.  True, given time, the stream forms the banks. Highly creative people shape society, thus creating circumstances and context, and in reality each of us shifts those banks a bit. Undeniably, however, previous generations of flows have formed large, sturdy banks that provide contour for our own flow. Our shoes deepen the paths we tread, but for the most part the paths are already there. These previous generations exist on a number of scales. They can be the literal generations of people before us. They can also be our own previous days of work and social life. River banks are formed by the news we read, the conversations we engage. The present moment is molded by the context of all these bordering processes, the circumstances of our mental locale in space and time.  

Fluid dynamicists employ a famous non-dimensional number called the Reynolds Number. Knowing the number, they can tell whether a particular flow is in a turbulent regime, with a nested hierarchy of whirls, or is in what they call a laminar regime, with smooth, even flow. The Reynolds Number is a ratio between two energies: kinetic over viscous. When the kinetic energy is relatively large compared to viscous dissipation, the flow contains spins. Alternatively, when the kinetic energy is low relative to viscosity, the flow is even. A leaf in a laminar flow will follow a rather linear path. In turbulence, the leaf pirouettes its way downstream. 

Could we make an analogy to the mind? When you’re in a slow mode, there are fewer whirlpools. To make the analogy complete, we’d have to posit something like a psychological Reynolds’s number: the intensity of disturbance created by velocity in life, relative to a dampening force, which is the ability to deal with the disturbances. To reduce the amount of mental time spent in whirlpools, we could work to either lower the external disturbances or increase the internal ability to deal with them.

Turbulence surely is often part of the fun. You might be running a river, carried in a inner tube, and you seek out the thrilling spots of turbulence. But usually you want the spins for only part of the ride. So there’s a balance between paddling yourself over to the challenging swirls of life and further developing your inner viscosity to ensure smooth flow most of the time. Thinking these thoughts made me start to feel “thicker.”

© 2025 by Tyler Volk

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