A dog, when it is preparing its bed for sleep, will circle round and round, chasing its tail in a fashion, before it finally decides to lay down. Today, on my hill climbs, I thought of the circling dog and realized that I am guilty of the same behaviour. I go round in a cognitive circle.

This was first noted in the period after I became aware of the injury. I would lie awake at night. My thoughts would circle round and round as I tried to fathom what had happened to me, the future implications, the nature of the action to be taken, if any. None of these manifold questions and issues were ever resolved. The mind, however, did not give up the attempt at a solution. It continued the cognitive circling, going round and round, an endless series of cognitive doughnuts carved from the night as the mind attempted to make sense of what it failed to understand.

The reader may object that I am giving the mind an existence of its own, attributing to it a life separate from the bodily corpus it inhabits. This is an age old dualism. Philosophers will tell you it is a false dualism. But once you experience brain injury, you become acutely conscious of the degree to which everything in your world, subjective, objective, internal, external, bodily perception, physical activity, sense of taste, smell, balance and humour, all of these elements of your life are wholly and totally dependent on the correct function of the 8.5 pounds of fibrous jello that sits between your ears. Your entire sense of you requires the jello to do its thing, whatever that may be. When the jello becomes less than co-operative, when it throws out 60 odd years of learning and forces you to start over from scratch, that is when you arrive at the belief that there is you, there is your brain, one is entirely dependent on the other, and the other is not cooperating.

This constant mental churning would keep me awake until three or four in the morning. I would finally fall asleep from exhaustion, my problems unresolved. Still not fully comprehended.

On the hill climb today, I realized I act like a dog when it comes to preparing submissions. I spend a huge amount of time circling round, and round, the project. I create written drafts as I go. These drafts become huge affairs in which every possible detail is listed. I devote endless resources to the compilation of everything, and find myself mired in the midst of an expanding data cloud, unable to fight my way to any form of clarity. Going round and round like a dog chasing his tail as he circles his bed.

I just want to give up.