Most of the time, I have refrigerator mind, which is where my brain is just quietly humming along, kicking in and out as necessary with no external prompting needed to maintain operations.
For a while, this seemed to be increasing with my age, which worried me somewhat, that it could be a warning sign of memory loss or worse. I feared it could signal that my attention span was getting shorter or that my personal ambitions were being curtailed.
But after witnessing several examples of refrigerator mind in a few of my nephews, I remembered that this was my default mode in childhood as well. Dad’s listening to sports talk radio? Refrigerator mind. Teacher going on about math? Refrigerator mind. Standing in the outfield watching everyone else play baseball? Refrigerator mind.
There is a peacefulness that comes when one enters into the refrigerator mindset where emotions are in check and nothing seems to really faze you.
Sometimes I’ll be reading a book and suddenly realize that I have no idea what has happened for the past several pages. I thought I was reading, but really, the refrigerator had kicked in and I was just going through the motions.
My refrigerator mind helped me get through all manner of part-time jobs from delivering newspapers as a child to bagging groceries as a teen and delivering pizzas as an adult. A good long car trip alone can be therapeutic if for no other reason than to enter into my refrigerator mindset for several hours.
My wife doesn’t believe in my refrigerator mindset. When it clicks on, she thinks I am brooding or hiding something from her. But really, I’m just moderating temperature and humidity to keep everything from spoiling.
Buddhists spend years trying to develop a mantra to quiet their mind and center their soul. They shouldn’t be looking for a word, but for a mechanical hum. Persistent and dull, like a well-hydrated hangover. A vast stretch of greyness shrouding thoughts and emotions with an efficiency of purpose.
A refrigerator motor has no sullenness or attitude, it simply performs as expected with no differentiation between high performance and the bare minimum. That’s pretty chill.
Slipping into refrigerator mind is a great strategy for getting ahead at the office. When someone makes a suggestion at work, half of the people will explain why it will never work while the other half tacitly support it, but the refrigerator mind just absorbs it, offending nobody and humming peacefully along.
Refrigerators don’t last forever, but they’re rarely fired. Usually, it just surprises everyone when one day they quit. And when they do, it’s not the end of the world, a new one is just a short transaction away.
It isn’t unusual to assign heroic ideals to inanimate objects. The entire state of New Hampshire used to pay homage to a rock that kind of looked like an old man. I lived there when it fell over, people completely lost their minds. Poets write about nature, artists draw bowls of fruit, and Tom Hanks made a buddy comedy film co-starring a volleyball. Aspiring to be like a refrigerator isn’t any weirder than that.
My refrigerator is almost entirely unremarkable. It doesn’t come with any bells or whistles, it simply fit the right dimensions, does its job and quietly hums along.
Sometimes, that’s all you need for a balanced, happy life; it’s always seemed pretty cool to me.
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