I slump into O’Hill, mentally drained from a two-hour lab, and I spy the neat pile of tomatoes on the counter. Shiny, red and perfectly round, the tomatoes look quite content. As I chew my own tomato-topped sandwich, my mind runs. How pleasant would it be to be a tomato, I think. The only time a tomato is drained is after it has been rinsed in the colander. From the corner of my eye I watch the man at the sandwich station methodically slicing heads of lettuce. The lettuce doesn’t even care, I think. The lettuce has no cares.
I am envious of the vegetables.
How pleasant it would be to be a vegetable. A vegetable doesn’t wonder about what they should wear that day, or how many chromosomes are in a human diploid cell, or what classes to take in order to get the ‘best educational experience.’ They don’t wonder if the words they spoke today were too harsh, or why some people get away with horrible crimes. They don’t wonder, they don’t think — they’re just empty.
At times it seems the only constant in my life is my continually running mind. I’ll lie awake for hours, not from the noise outside my room, but from the drone of my inner voice.
Was my email to my professor too informal? Or did I sound arrogant? Should I have gone to that interest meeting? I’m seriously behind on my reading, how long can I go before I’ll drown in pages of modal ontological arguments? I wonder what that small boy from “Hannah Montana” is doing these days? How many hours of sleep can I get while still being able to function?
My watch beeps 4 a.m.
I wonder what it would feel like — to be utterly empty, to be utterly free.
It was raining on another particularly draining day. I raced up to my dorm, huddled in the hood of my rain jacket, when my foot nudged something squishy. I looked down to see a molding pizza, and a single slice of tomato dissolving in a puddle of water. The pitiable tomato had been stepped on multiple times so that its red juice mixed with the rain water and flowed in tiny trickles down the cracks of the sidewalk. I entered my dorm to find a lively discussion going on about the nature of God and whether reincarnation was possible. I crashed down on the floor to join the conversation, grabbing the bag of pretzels nearby. As one girl explained her personal theory about the intricacies of transmigration, my mind drifted back to the tomato that was probably completely dissolved by now.
I surely didn’t envy the vegetable now. A vegetable doesn’t have an opinion about the cycle of death. A vegetable doesn’t have an opinion about anything. Even if it did, it wouldn’t be able to express it. How mournful that is — to never wonder, to never think, to never know.
There is something almost torturous about the human mind. Thoughts build on thoughts, which build on worries, which build on thoughts — we never get a break. Yet without that torture, where would we be? A vegetable couldn’t paint “The Starry Night,” or compose 95 symphonies while deaf, or suddenly understand the force of gravity with one bonk on the head from an apple. A vegetable can’t gush over a newly born baby, or cry satisfying tears of joy at the end of an Oscar worthy movie. A vegetable will never look out the window as the rain hits the glass and notice how the droplets create a kaleidoscopic rainbow of orange and yellow from the street lights below. Nor will it ever laugh with a group of people and wonder what fate could have brought them together in the same place, in the same room and at the same time.
The human mind can be torturous, but without that small bit of torture there would be no eureka moments. Yes, a vegetable may be utterly free, but free from what? Free from the joy of knowledge and realization? How free would that really be?
There are still many days when my mind is filled to the point of explosion, where I wish nothing more than to sit on a counter and think of nothing at all. Yet my thoughts are what make me human and ultimately, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
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