If you’re lucky, you’ve got a dental hygienist who isn’t particularly chatty with you while your mouth’s propped open and drying out by the second. They might ask you what flavor fluoride you’d like, but besides that they just leave you to stare at the ceiling and listen to their lame-o soundtrack.
When I visited my dentist on Tuesday, I was lucky and had my usual hygienist. I can expect two things from her always. She will make a comment about how her sister lives in St. Louis where I go to college, and she will floss the hell out of my gums. But for the most part she leaves me alone.
So there I am staring up at the corkboard-looking ceiling and thinking. Just thinking about a lot of stuff. Internships I want to get next year, where I want to move after graduation, my relationships. Even the banal stuff like what I want for lunch and what book I’m going to read next seem infused with more insight.
And I don’t really know why the dentist’s chair is bringing this out in me. It’s certainly not the environment. There’s a drill shrieking somewhere, making the hairs on my arms stand on end, and it smells like heavy-duty bleach. Then I get it. It’s because I literally have nothing else to do.
As a devoted Nerdfighter, I recall one of the Vlogbrothers videos made by John Green a couple weeks ago called “In Pursuit of Silence.” John was saying something about how there isn’t any silence anymore. Even the most silent places we can find are still humming with this kind of “standby” silence that isn’t really silence at all but just the white noise of everyday life, the whirring of an air-conditioner or the beeping of a computer.
But I think it’s even more than that. It’s the fact that there are so few times in my life these days when I don’t have something I’m “supposed” to be doing. Even during down time, I feel like I’m “supposed” to be catching up on my TV shows or getting ahead on laundry. How many times in the past month have I just sat and thought? Just let my mind wander without policing it when it strays too far from the task.
I used to sometimes lie down and listen to music and just think, but even that isn’t really unadulterated thinking. There’s music, and then I’m thinking about that music. But in the dentist’s chair there is literally nothing to do, nothing to look at. The lack of sensory stimulation frees me.
I once read a quote that said (probably somewhere on Pinterest), “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where it goes when your mind wanders.” Lately I’ve been feeling a little misguided, not sure of what I actually want and what I’ve just convinced myself that I want. I’m thinking I might to do a little less “soul searching” and a little more staring at blank canvases.