m&ms in solitary

This article is not too long and thoroughly FASCINATING. Please read it if you get a chance.

Thinking about solitude or at least free time has made me wonder what I will do with my idle hands. I note that I need to constantly be handling something if I am not working on something. Sitting on the bus this morning, spare the air, I played with my earring for quite a while before I even realized that was what I was doing. Pulling my hands away from my earring, my fingers immediately found a piece of my backpack that I could fold, unfold, fold again, unfold again, etc.

When my mind is idle, and sometimes even when it is not, it is always searching for something to fill it up. I listen to the news as background at work in part so that I can focus on my work; so that I won't be searching for noises in the background to keep my mind busy. Now, I do the same thing with the clock radio in the morning. I can count on at least another half hour of sleep after the alarm goes off because the news will keep my mind busy and allow me to sleep. The stories will be folded into my dreams, but I won't wake up.

I worry a little as my residential retreat at the meditation center approaches that I will have trouble emptying my mind. I have always been unable to meditate for this reason, or at least believed myself to be incapable of meditating. Why am I going to a retreat then? Because I really want to empty my mind of the "business" -- that is the busy-ness... all of those crazy, random, usually self-sabotage thoughts that run through my mind continuously. I don't seem to have an off button and I can't tune it down; or I haven't found the controls.

In a few weeks, I am hoping to force myself to uncover the controls...to implement a quiet time; to force myself to focus on breathing, living, listening to my heart beat.

So, reading about this man in solitary confinement captivated my imagination.

Think...all you have is time, in a controlled environment with very little stimulation, if any. How many grains make up a cinderblock? I think I would have an answer if I had had to spend every day and night in a small box made out of cinderblock for 20 years. Turning things over and over in my mind, might I have gone crazy? Would I have figured out a way to see in my mind beyond what I could see with my eyes? Would the world have progressed in my mind as it progressed outside the cellblock? What kind of art could or would I produce under these circumstances?

I wish I knew without having to experience the sensory deprivation of solitary confinement.

Beyond the musing of the by-products of solitary confinement, I was also struck by the brutality of this treatment. Perhaps it is not technically torture, but it is certainly a form of psychological mistreatment. What could possibly be gained by doing this to someone? In what was is this treatment rehabilitation?

One more thought raced through my mind as I read this piece: how is this like mental illness? Is someone who struggles with keeping track of what is real and what is imagined living in the same kind of confinement in reverse? So much stimulation with few tools for filtering which is true and which is not. Do those with mental illness long for a day outside this cell? Are they so used to the over-stimulation that they would not know what to do without the extra stimulation? Would they be like the borg disconnected from the collective, bereft, alone, solitary??