You get used to it after a while and at some point the parenthesis 'disappear' and stop taking up mental cycles.

I often thought about this - at first I struggled a lot and wasted so much time trying to match parens, but after some time my brain adapted and then I actually liked the syntax, especially if your editor supports selecting forms or you use something like parinfer, which matches parens based on indentation.

Clojure has special syntax for collections of various types, so it's even easier to parse after you get used to it imo.

For me, the bigger challenge was wrapping my head around functional programming using immutable data structures, since that wasn't just syntax, it required me to 'unlearn' thinking in OO paradigm and adopting a new way of thinking about how the program works. You get used to that too after a while.