Mental Furniture

Taking a week-long hiatus from social media in honour of the Holidays has allowed me to shift + shuffle around the creaking floorboards of my mind. I have come to wake up to the blatant fact that my (over)usage of technology has become a dependency. 

La petite mort: parts of my self were dying. My mind was starting to resemble a cotton and soap-smelling muted living room of a grandmother—of slow energy and movement. Swiping down to refresh Instagram or Facebook, my eyes would dart at the half-read copy of full-forgotten book or stare into the memory of regular meditation. At work, I force myself to not pick up (or rather click on) a calculator to plug in elementary arithmetic problems. I peek over the desks of colleagues who do the same. We're all hopping or tripping amidst one mental dusty bunny or another, staring mindlessly at our phones. 

So, here's to patting down on the old floorboards + rising from dusty seats of our minds. This is a rearrangement of our mental furniture. The first of my challenges and my very first New Year's resolution is to memorise a poem. Exercising the body is a commitment and so is this mental exercise. I had once read a comment from someone who recalled how her professor at Columbia called this kind of memorisation "investing in your own 'mental furniture.' He had memorised most of Shakespeare's sonnets, and he loved the idea that he'd always have those words as furniture in his head for his thoughts to sit on, even in old age. " 

Here's a sofa that one day I will eventually lie on, but in the meantime, I'm looking at this poem by Jane Kenyon, another one by T.S. Eliot, one by Pablo Neruda, and another loving last one from Pablo Neruda. Share below your favourite poem!