When I sit still, small ripples begin rising in the once calm water of my head. In noisy places, my head may feel so quiet that its color seems pure white; only later do shadows of waves begin to appear. I cannot see the waves themselves. I infer them from their shadows. As time passes and the ripples grow into waves, the surface gains texture, and thoughts begin appearing one by one like foam. If there is an island inside, I want to take a boat out from it and gather all those thoughts with a dragonfly net.
Perhaps the opposite is true. When outside stimuli exist, both my outer and inner eyes are fixed on the external world, reality, and so I cannot see the sea of thought that is always there. Perhaps seeking a quiet environment and turning my gaze inward is like rowing a small boat along a river toward the sea. Then the ripples passing beside me become waves not because I simply waited, but because the inner self rowed through the waterway and reached the sea.
I once compared this to boiling water. If I heat the container in my head that holds thoughts, it eventually boils and those thoughts evaporate with the water, condensing above as vapor. But the more I think about it, the less plausible it seems that I can harvest anything from my inner world without moving even one finger. Like a fisherman, I must at least take a boat out to the island I have marked for gathering thoughts.
To reach that small island there is a waterway I must pass. The boat is tiny, so if it misses the fixed route, it may run aground on sand before even leaving the river. Even at the meeting point of river and sea, I must avoid deltas of sand or carry the boat by hand. Calming thought enough to write is not easy. It is waiting until another self inside me finishes the journey to the island and catches a thought to show the waking me. Waiting requires an object, but until that inner self shows me the thought, I do not know what it is. Curiosity about it is also thought, and if curiosity or impatience grows too thick, it fills the vessel where the inner thought should enter.
I must wait quietly, without special thoughts and without seeking special stimuli. The beginning is hard because I must pass through a place with no sound except the sound of rowing. After a while, thoughts begin leaping out. Among them appears something longer, neither film nor story, a pure-form thought. When analyzed into visible form, it resembles a dream expressed in words. Even vivid dreams, when recorded, lose their front and back around the point one tried to write. Thoughts hauled from the sea and refined also vanish if I think too hard about translation into words or the exact word to use. I should not try too hard; I should faithfully take down only what is thrown to me.
Polishing can happen after leaving the sea, when the boat is no longer needed and only the waking me remains.
Thought itself is a journey. Without that journey, the thoughts inside me would only circulate. In reality, the sea’s fish and salt are resources necessary to those who live in the world. I think my inner sea also feeds me. Whether I can consume that nourishment depends on me. That sea differs greatly from what the waking me can think. Perhaps looking into it out of curiosity and gathering personal writing material is not bad, but later it may turn out to have a medical effect necessary to the mind.
When I read, the process of converting letters into images or scenes in my head seems to create vacuum-like instants between frames. After reading for a long time, thoughts I want to express are waiting, gathered in enough weight that they cannot branch further. The same thing sometimes happens after quiet old black-and-white films with simple stories, but it never happens after short Instagram stories or YouTube Shorts meant to empty the head. If stray thought and rest mean slipping through the gaps in the real brain’s thinking process and going fishing in the sea of thought, then failing to do so means there is no gap, no true leisure.
Videos may relieve the pressure of tasks a little, but that does not mean the head rests. Each person may define rest differently. For me, rest must include the brain, so I read books. As I said, other thoughts arising is evidence that the head has rested. It is also because those natural thoughts, rising like wave foam, resemble dreams.
How many of these waves I experience determines how much leisure the day contains. It also determines how much of the writing I love I can do. I imagine rowing a small boat along a quiet river not yet sea, barely flowing, while sunset falls behind me. When I reach the island, what I see is moonlight, a Milky Way so vast that it covers the sky despite the moon, and countless bubbles on the waves sparkling toward a sky where faint lights gather into a giant chandelier. That is the amniotic fluid where my writing is born.
Korean original: 생각의 파도