According to a certain personality test called the Enneagram, I am a “4.”

“You love to be in pain and you love to be around people in pain,” said my workout trainer, who is well-versed in the Enneagram’s vagarities. I don’t have to tell you, this pained me.

But what pains me more than loving pain is this: I have not had a deep thought in months. Silly thoughts, yes. (Can ladybugs sense that I like them?) Dull thoughts, yes oh yes. (Why does unscented soap have a smell?) Stupid thoughts? Too many to keep track of. (I recently wrote about how I “realized” that with my next birthday, I would be older than myself.) But deep ones? While I used to spend the better part of my days immersed in them, I now find myself awash in shallow thought pools like these: “Why, when the dog sleeps, does her tongue exit her mouth?” and the related, “When I sleep, where does MY tongue go?”

Last November my husband and I took a road trip to an artist’s studio in Altamont, Tennessee. It was a beautiful, warm fall day, a fact I felt compelled to make note of over and over again. Sometimes I altered the phraseology. For example, after I said, “It’s so beautiful and warm for fall!” I changed it, ten minutes later, to “It’s really very warm for fall.” Sometimes I just altered the emphasis (“It’s so WARM for fall! later became “It’s SO warm for fall!”)

As I listened to myself prattle on about the weather, I was reminded of my husband’s grandmother who, when she saw a video of their family Christmas, asked, “Who’s that old lady who won’t shut up?” It was she, of course, her incessant chatter filling up the entire soundtrack. This is how it happens, I thought. One minute you’re young and scintillating, and the next minute you’re a meteorologist with too few adjectives.

Of course, for all I know, inside my husband’s grandmother’s head was an original treatise on Aristotle’s theories of logic just waiting to be written up when all the guests left. But I am only an apologist for Grandma now because the whole time I am nattering away about the air temperature vis-à-vis the time of year, I am reminding myself that, despite how it might seem to an outsider (i.e. my husband), my head is not the airless chamber I always imagined his grandmother’s to be. That it still has important stuff in it.

But I’m losing the argument with myself.

I think the Internet has something to do with my dwindling capacity for deep thought. Prior to the advent of Google, answers to my tongue questions would never have been urgent enough to warrant a sudden, unplanned trip to the library. Now, however, the fact that I can know in a flash that the dog’s tongue exits her mouth when she sleeps because she’s very relaxed, and that when I sleep, my tongue rests against the floor of my mouth, makes me desperate to know these things as soon as I wonder about them. And not just these things. After tongues are demystified there are all manner of questions about eye-twitching, Grand Canyon deaths, and why we have only in the past few years come to know quinoa.

My other theory about where my deep thoughts went is that they are hanging out with my ability to sleep through the night and to stop my urine mid-stream just because I want to. In other words, they’ve been exiled for the sin of being an important part of a satisfying life.

Now I see I took my deep thoughts for granted. In the past, they were always around, like new grass in the spring. But unlike grass, they’re hard to grow on demand, and even if they do take root, they’re hard to keep alive. Now my deep thoughts are more like dreams. They are altered by thinking about them; they are skittish and coy, and afraid of the light.

Years ago, as an adolescent, I had what may have been my earliest deep thought. In my journal I wrote, “I miss my dog while I’m holding her.” On the surface this suggested that I could see a future in which my dog would not be with me. On a deeper level, however, it was a reckoning: the understanding that, even as I held her, there was some ineffable part of her that I could not hold.

So it is with my deep thoughts. They slip away before I can fully grasp them. They shape shift before I can define them. They dissipate before I can contain them. In their place are repetitive musings about the weather and trifling Internet searches that feel urgent. I don’t know what to do but notice it, grieve it, and hope nobody, anywhere, is making a video.

 

Dana Shavin is the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist. Her website is Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected], and follow her on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes.