I often catch myself, or rather I catch my thoughts, travelling back and forth in time. “What do I have to do next week?” “What was in the e-mail I wrote to my colleague last week? Let me read it again.” “I want to do this by the end of the year.”, and so on. It happens often that I observe how the mind likes to jump around, it’s probably a funny and entertaining game. But it can also be frustrating and tiring, because we compare our desires with what really is, or we project thoughts that are not always very close to reality. What I find fascinating is that mostly we already know what the thoughts are about, so this hopping around is just a repetition of patterns we know, of thoughts we have already thought, of content we have already gone through, mostly several times.
Sometimes, in this loud thinking situations, there is some sort of calmer, deeper and more intelligent mind stepping in. It says: where are you now? What are you doing now? Is it really important to re-read that mail again? We do not always listen to that smaller voice, mostly because we think we need to move on, to do staff, to not be still and watch. But if we are silent and quiet, that smaller voice can rise, and mostly it has something better to offer.
In the meantime I am convinced that to preserve our energies, to be less frustrated and deluded, to keep from dissipating towards the future and the past, it’s really worth to listen more and more to that small voice. If you you give it space, that voice might say: “see where you are now, this is what counts. Just be here. Do what you have to do now, deal with what you have to deal to now.” Of course planning is useful, important and sometimes necessary. But how often we just repeat thoughts and plans we already know? Stopping and seeing where we are now is maybe worth a try and can definitely bring more awareness and calmness.
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