Goodbye to Ten Years As A Bloated Goldfish, Hello to Becoming An Old Lady in the Window of a Brooklyn Tenement, or, How I Learned to Think Inside the Box Again

by Mark Morelli
February 7, 2007

If I'm anything, I'm a creative guy. Sometimes at the expense of being detail oriented. A year ago, I was a little sloppy at work, overlooking the details of a project. My manager, kindly and painstakingly, pointed out my errors with the promise to help me figure out how to overcome the habit.

"Let's put a box around this problem," she said.

Okay, now let's go back to the mid-1990s, when my life intersected with the Internet.

Like I said, I've always been a curious guy, and loved to spend hours exploring. Whether it was a long walk through the neighborhood, wandering through new neighborhoods, browsing through libraries, I loved the very sense of discovery through serendipity. In fact, I sometimes skipped classes in college in order to just explore the ads and articles of 1940s Newsweeks, for instance.

With the Internet at my fingertips, my curiosity can wander like crazy -- without even schlepping to the library. It's too convenient. I've indulged my curiosity much more than I've enforced the discipline to write. They say that a goldfish will keep eating as long as you feed it. The goldfish will eat till it croaks. I was the goldfish.

And so my mind filled up, up, up with clutter and my writing productivity went down, down, down.

The sewage backup into my brain, combined with having a family of growing kids and a household that also is filling up with junk, overwhelmed me.

Each morning I felt obliged to tackle the pile of information surrounding me. Magazines, newspapers, emails, and any news I cared to follow on the all-you-can-eat Internet buffet.

While writing, I listened to talk radio, and if someone mentioned a book or issue, I could immediately Google the topic or even buy the book or movie in seconds.

Having your typewriter (your computer) combined with a TV and library (the web) turned technology into my Jezebel, and I succumbed to the temptation. I procrastinated and my productivity sunk to an all-time low.

How depressing, I writer who couldn't complete a sentence. I sought a simpler life.

I looked up books on simplicity. Just perusing Amazon's hundreds of books about simplicity was exhausting. That's irony!

I'm inspired by David Remnick's 2000 New Yorker profile of author Philip Roth. He attributes Roth's prolific output to "ruthlessly paring everything superfluous from his life" He adds that Roth "writes in a monkish cell of a studio without even a parakeet to distract him. The Cone of Silence descends and the hourless workday begins. He stays out here all day and into the evening; no telephone, no fax. Nothing gets in."

I don't have a country house, or the time to be a scriptorium monk. I have a day job. So how would I keep things out?

I'd put a box around it.

I made my front window that box. That window looks out onto a quiet, dead end street that is lit by a street lamp in the pre-dawn hours.

When I wake, instead of diving into the newspaper, I sit on the couch, sip coffee and gaze out the window. I feel like those old women in Brooklyn tenement houses who saw everything that happened on their street because they were all the time looking out the window.

And here is my Brooklyn: Rain, falling leaves, snowflakes or tree branches swaying the breeze. Dusk evaporating to dawn. It is a stillness that allows me to half-dream, to ruminate. It is to me what the Mississippi River was to Huck.

And in this stillness, the dead end street is no longer dead. It's the great place in the universe where I rake the leaves that children jump into, the sidewalk they mark with chalk, the grass where they do flips and cartwheels, the quiet asphalt where they ride scooters and bikes.

The dizzy maelstrom of everything else is outside the box. But each morning at six, I'm safe inside the box. It's a start.