Uhhhh… ummmm… could I please get a bean and cheese burrito with a single… (insert long pause)… uhhhhh… ENCHILADA! CHEESE ENCHILADA! And another… (insert longer pause) Shredded… ummmm… wait… a… annnnothhherrrr… bean burrito with no cheese… wait… with cheese and another… WITH… CHEESE! Wait. Did I order a combo yet? The one with the shredded… can I get a burrito with the combo? Or… wait…
I’ll spare you the rest of that conversation as the saintly woman at El Coyote (the people’s Mexican restaurant) sat on the other end of the phone, hushed as a church mouse and patient as an owl on Xanax while she witnessed my confounded bewilderment during the longest to-go order in the history of long to-go orders. My brain has become altered and not in any of the fun ways. Santa put Covid in our stockings this year and it’s been… well… quite Covidy©;) Almost hit the 3 year mark without a blemish on our record and then… whoopsie doodles, you got it.
The whole fam is recovering but this “brain fog”, which I thought wasn’t a thing, turns out is a thing. I guess “fog” is a pretty good descriptive but it seems more like certain parts and access points of my mind will shut down at random, immediately so. The environment has been compromised. Someone partied in my cerebral kitchen and left all the dirty dishes in the sink. Not cool. Ever.
But my point of this isn’t to cry about my mental state but it’s to look at my reaction when these psychological hiccups happen. When they come up… I resist. My brow furrows, my breath gets shorter, my jaw opens in an attempt to shove the words out of my mouth and once they do come, I’m frustrated about it. All these things are less than pleasurable and do nothing to speed up or help out my present condition. My resistance to what IS happening brings me… let’s say it together… suffering.
So I’ve now begun to “sit in the fog”. When these moments present themselves and I feel as if my vocabulary is drowning in a chasm of CoolWhip, I pause instead of furiously leaning forward, I sit instead of throw emotional punches in the air and allow the moment to be what it is… a moment, nothing else. A temporal happening with zero purpose. Another reminder that… this too shall pass. Turns out when I don’t rage against not getting access to what I want, that access is granted quicker without my distraught two cents.
If you want something, stop wanting it and take a deep breath instead. Sometimes you gotta sit in the fog and wait for it to clear. Otherwise you could end up going the wrong direction completely.
