The Wandering Mind

I've been over this few days been thinking about how we label things, especially when it comes to the way our brains work. For a lot of us my age, the world of the 70s and 80s was a far simpler place, in some ways. Or at least, the explanations for things were. I was a kid who had a genuinely severe time trying to concentrate. I’d be sitting in class, the teacher talking about fractions or the capital of Burma, and my mind would just… get up and leave. Not in a rebellious way, you understand, but in an involuntary, "Oh, look, a crack in the ceiling, I wonder what the building's made of, I wonder who built it, I wonder if they had a pet cat, I wonder what a cat's purr sounds like, I wonder why cats purr..." kind of way. The adults in my life had a simple, if blunt, explanation for this. I wasn't trying hard enough. I was lazy. I wasn't applying myself. It was all a matter of sheer will. "Just focus," they'd say, as if it were as easy as turning a light switch on and off. There was no grey area, no different operating system for the brain. There was just effort, or a lack of it. And for a kid who was trying, who genuinely wanted to keep up, that judgment felt like a quiet but persistent kind of failure.

Fast-forward to today, and that same experience would be given a different label entirely. It would be called ADHD. I appreciate that we've come a long way. The idea that a genuine neurological difference is at play is a world away from the "you're just lazy" school of thought. It's a huge step toward empathy and understanding. But as I’ve thought about it, even that doesn't feel quite right for me. The term "deficit" and "disorder" implies something broken that needs fixing. It frames it as a negative. And while I won't deny the very real challenges that come with it, I've come to believe that what I have isn't a disorder at all. It's what I’ve come to call a wandering mind. And in a strange way, it feels like a more honest description. The mind, for me, is a bit like an old library that's been left to its own devices. You pick up one book, and a stray word on a page reminds you of another book on a different shelf, which then reminds you of a movie you saw, which reminds you of a conversation you had in a café last month, which reminds you of the smell of coffee, which reminds you of.... One idea doesn’t lead to a conclusion; it opens up a thousand little threads, each one leading to another, and another, and another. It's a kind of beautiful, chaotic, and very inefficient web of thought.

Let's be real. This wandering mind is not without its challenges. It’s absolutely a curse when you’re trying to do something that requires a single, linear focus. Writing an email can become a multi-hour journey into the etymology of a word you just used. Finishing a book becomes a Herculean task, as every paragraph sends you off on a new, unrelated intellectual scavenger hunt. It's the curse of being unmoored. The "now" is constantly competing with the "what if," the "remember when," and the "what does that mean." It's the frustration of starting a task with clear intent and finding yourself, an hour later, knee-deep in a completely different project you never meant to start, all because one tiny thought thread led to another. It makes us look scattered, disorganised, and unreliable to others. We often feel misunderstood, and sometimes, even to ourselves, it feels like a genuine, persistent struggle to simply exist in the same mental space as everyone else.

Here's the other side of the coin, the part that makes me resist calling it a "disorder.”. This same inability to stay on one path is also the very genesis of creativity. When you can make connections between seemingly unrelated things without even trying, that's where new ideas are born. That's where you find the unexpected solutions, the clever analogies, the new angles on old problems. A wandering mind is a mind that is constantly remixing and re-blending all the information it has ever gathered. It sees a problem not as a single, isolated challenge, but as a vast network of threads, any one of which might be the key. The very thing that stops you from concentrating on a single task is the same thing that allows you to see the connections between things that a more focused, linear brain might never even consider. It’s what gives us a unique perspective, the ability to think outside of the box because, frankly, the box was never a very comfortable place to begin with. This is what helps me look for and find solutions to things that most people find difficult in the industry I am part of; It has for sure made me successful as an IT architect.  

So maybe, this isn't a bug. It's a feature. It's a different way of processing the world. And if we, as a society, are so eager to label it as a "deficit" or a "disorder," maybe we're losing sight of the creative potential it represents. It's taken me 30-plus years after school to understand this simple idea. A new born baby uses both halves of their brain in unison—a wandering mind. Then we go to school, we're taught to focus, to follow a linear path, and we "lose" that simple skill. We're taught that this kind of mind is "wrong." But life, I suppose is to be a reflection of one's thoughts. And wouldn't it be a richer, more vibrant reflection if we learned to appreciate, and even harness, the glorious, chaotic mess of our own wandering minds?

C