Wait, does music count as working against the default mode network? What if I enjoy ambient that makes me reflect and live in the ambiguity and think about my life, memories, and everything?
I watched a video encouraging boredom. And I was thinking that at home, I do listen to ambient and do write a lot as a way to help me pace the influx, stream, and flux of my thoughts during such intense moments. It is only when I’m at the cafe during which I read and take active notes constantly throughout the entire day that my DMN is practically invisible. Being at home in a room all alone is perfect fuel for thoughts. It used to be very painful due to trauma, but it became my sanctuary, healing place, self-reclamation, and headquarters for my writing and intellectual and creative ambitious expansions.
It is the reason that I was able to write over 3.5 million words. One may think that it is over-analysis or analysis paralysis, but in reality, it is me sitting down in this room and shifting from a reliance on TPN through things like video games to using writing as a away to manage the DMN directly through explicit addressal of my concerns and the things that run through my mind while I am here in this room and without any simple distraction. It has become a daily all-day habit for me to sit down here and just feel the weight of every single little thing and to feel the contours, curves, ridges, raised surfaces, depressions, nicks, scratches, and slight vibrations of everything around mme and to take the time to have a gentle conversation and accommodation for all of it. It is like staring at the wall and immediately being assaulted only to have a magic shield that absorbs all that ingoing energy into outgoing expression, not through some indirect coping mechanism, but through a continuously refining speaking ability that takes full advantage of its pre-existing lexicon and history of speech over time and does not yield merely to the ways of this world because it is more self-sufficient than entirely dependent.
But it is true that having moments where you’re not just expressing yourself out of the backlog that has accumulated so ambitiously is a great thing. Such moments of exposing yourself to the world and feeling the helplessness of not expressing yourself so thoroughly. It can feel like self-effacement, like you need to be more confident and thoroughly have yourself be fully out there, vocalized, explored, appreciated, and given that full platform. But we must incubate under this creative strangling. In other words, the DMN of self-confrontation needs to be balanced with the TPN of exposing yourself to external narratives, even if it means feeling drifty and self-effacing.
Music can help with this balance.