Go, monkey mind, go

I don't think I made up the term "monkey mind" myself. It refers, I've decided / read, to the magical quality of total innocence. Say, when you first learn to bowl and roll a strike because you're not hung up on your shoes or your form, or how crooked your pinkie has to get.

When you don't know it can't be done, in other words. There's a freedom there, before you get down to the nitty-gritty of "technique" and "precedent" and "details" and sometimes -- rarely, but it does happen -- you just ... do it.

Sometimes I'll be daydreaming and ideas will start circling like angry birds, wheeling and coming in so fast my head aches at the thought of writing them all down. I used to lunge for pen and paper, and scrawl incomprehensibilities like "Queen wall bricks" or "Lollipop paper -- semicolon not Tennyson!!!"

This was anti-monkey mind. True monkey mind just lets all those ideas slosh around for awhile -- overnight is best -- before plucking them out.

Other times I'll just forget. Monkey mind is not infallible; there's a reason it's not called Cyborg Mind.

But sometimes, if you can sneak up on a problem (e.g., "who's that bald guy, the lead singer of Genesis, who is NOT called Paul Simon even though that's all I can come up with"; or "how can I get this big meaning into this little sentence") and surprise it after not thinking about it ... you can trap it and figure it out. That's monkey mind.