Our good intentions are often derailed by a torrent of thoughts wildly cascading and colliding within our mind. All this commotion sabotages our creativity and productivity.
If you’ve ever ridden in a classic carnival bumper car you’ll have a good idea what it’s like inside your mind as your thoughts travel from point to point along your thought streams.
Our mind creates an internal environment much like standing in line at the dept of motor vehicles. it’s almost like a flashing neon sign telling us to Hurry Up and Wait.
Once this mental environment is created it mimics the hurry up and wait atmosphere everyone in today’s rush rush world is familiar with.
The frantic expectations, grasping, anger and restlessness of our current mind (adult) is nothing like the mind we had during the first few years on the planet.
Our original mind came equipped with full-throttle curiosity and openness to the current moment. That mind, is still available though if we practice mindfulness, consistently.
Hurry up and wait is the conundrum each of us faces as we start a mindfulness practice, and each of us will continue to face until we reach the tipping point in practice where we are mindful of each moment more that not.
Each intention we create passes through our minds seemingly endless stream of ideas, judgments and barriers before moving forward into action and completion.
“Everything that irritates us about others
C.G. Jung
can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Change Your Perspective
The more we believe our thoughts and ideas are the way things “should be” the harder it is for us to change our perspective about anything inside or outside our world.
A mind living in s soup of “should” often will find itself trapped and cut off from the larger world all around it.
With a small bit of focused introspection it’s simple to find our biggest and more ingrained beliefs that we’ve locked in our minds with “should.” If we think something or someone “should be” a certain way, we take away any opportunity for growth or improvement in what we’ve locked up.
Adding “should” to our beliefs diminishes our ability to create a better world.
Maybe we think people “should” dress a certain way and if they don’t we devalue their existence. Maybe we think people “should” only vote the way we do and if they don’t we will have little or nothing to do with them, in effect we can’t respect views that are not in concrete like ours’.
“Look at everything as though you are seeing it either for the first or last time, then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn