Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 42

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

by Tyler Volk

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

Day 42 Full Moon at Bridge 

I biked into the sunset. The late start for the standard ten-mile roundtrip was not accidental. I knew the rising moon would be huge and bathe the valley with mystical gray-white light for the ride home. 

A mile out, not yet at Heart Bar Preserve, I passed some cliffs on my left. They reminded me that this particular stretch would be in black shadow on the return. Would I be OK? I mentally ran through the answer. Yes. I had packed the small flashlight and some tape. I could hold the flashlight in one hand, and either try to rest that same hand partially on the handlebar, or ride with just one hand. Either way, I could then point the flashlight ahead exactly as I might want but would have to deal with balance problems. As an alternative, I could tape the flashlight somewhere to the bike frame (I ran through options), but then the beam wouldn’t fall upon the best spot on the road ahead. Taping, though, would allow me to ride with both hands.

Why was I thinking about all this in such excruciating detail? It was not an efficient use of my often good mind. Sure, the simulation helped alleviate any anxiety for the eventual return, by working through the possibilities of how I’d survive the dark stretch. But I certainly didn’t need to go into all those details so far ahead of time. All the options and their various pros and cons of sub-options were absolutely not relevant. They could be figured out later, on the return.  All I needed to say to myself now was: flashlight, check, now enjoy the ride. But no, the automatic anxiety posed a question and—boom—I was swept into a whirlpool of thought, which then ran off on its own until it finished and then tossed my mind out from it and back to myself, simply attending to the beauty of the ride. The process of worry, scenario-work, and finish was all so machine-like. 

Adding an evaluator is work! Work! It is extra psychological structure that needs to be built. It is almost like being back in calculus class, or learning about the Reynold’s number in graduate school with equations flying across the blackboard. Or figuring out, long ago, how to ask that first girl for a date. Maybe even like learning, even longer back in life, to ride a bicycle. Perhaps work in developing the evaluator now will lead to ease in its use in my future. 

At the bridge I stopped, parked the bike, and spent time looking both west, into the final gasps of color in the sky, and then east, at the glowing, pie-plate moon newly risen above the low hills and reflected in the water of the West Fork, which flowed under the bridge and away from me. 

We can think of the self as a system, a cognitive system. To what extent the parts of this psychological system we experience as this complex self corresponds to brain parts is not yet known. It seems clear that the situation is not as simple as the way the main physiological functions of the body—blood pumping, gas exchange, first stage digestion—correspond to the various organs of heart, lung, and stomach. Certain regions of he cognitive “body” have been located in the brain, for executive control, for several types of memories, for fear, and perhaps other for emotions, for motion coordination, for sensory processing. To some extent these must be the components, the “organs,” of cognition. But are they the parts of what we would call thinking, when we are in the stream of working something out or wrapped up in the sequential logic of mulling over a future situation?  

Consider just the three streams—inner music, inner visual imagery, and inner speech—as components of the overall flow of thought or cognition. We know they come from different brain regions. Of course, emotion is tied in, literally tying down what we ordinarily call thinking to a role of figuring out certain situations that contain underlying currents of desire or anxiety. Thinking is complex, with many braided components, and we probably should not be fooled into thinking that thinking is a certain singular thing by the use of the word “thinking.” For example, as noted, there are indications that the sensory flows themselves are thought-streams of what must also be called actual thinking. All these different modalities tend to be in the service of the organism. Together these modalities and other cognitive organs as noted produce a cognitive system, much of which is unconscious. And it’s also us as consciousness. In fact, whenever cognitive activity is more than a single image or single word . . . whenever it is a string of words like this sentence, or a string of images, or images combined with words, or melodies of music, then it is a system. How do we conceptualize thinking as a system, considering it related to the self itself—perhaps as a humungous whirlpool?

The idea of thought—it all its guises—as a system fits quite well with the concept of mental whirlpools, as whirlpools within the largest one. The thinking system is dynamic and attention-holding. It spins around within a somewhat confined mental space, visiting different areas, and at times returning, if not exactly to the same mental point then perhaps to the similar image or phrase of meaning or situation, there to re-start with different options, after having spun into temporary whirlpools of scenario-running and conclusions as portions of the largest whirlpool. We are a system of both eternal return and working ahead. There’s contentment in that.

© 2025 by Tyler Volk

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