It is my intention in this November edition of Soapbox to steer away from any mention at all of COVID. Damn. Anyway, I will press on. This month I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the workings of my brain, which is interesting as I am using the very thing that thinks to think about the thing that is doing the thinking.

Cleaning

There is a notion that we only use 10 percent of our brains, which is apparently false as even the normal day-to-day living of making tea, negotiating traffic and trying to remember where you left your car keys makes the grey matter light up like a Christmas tree. I would love to shut down 90 percent of my brain because there is an awful lot of unnecessary thought going on up there. 

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. Well of course they do – there was no Netflix in the 1600s. I seem to have ‘monkey mind’, the Buddhist term that describes an unsettled, restless and capricious...