“Your mind is totally out of control”
Nature has a unique ability to soothe the mind, dialing down thoughts and worries. This beauty is in one of my most beloved places. Arcadia, Greece.
I’m one of those people that are constantly ruminating. For every matter, I’m endlessly thinking of the possible outcomes, rehearsing the play and changing moods by one thought alone. This has always been a default state, trying to guess and handle all those different scenarios, because “I must be prepared". For a significant part of my life, I had that delusion that we must try and succeed to control everything.
From the important and difficult situations, to the smallest task, like when I had to return a flawed mixer (as ridiculous as that may seem), it takes hours and hours of thinking. In the back of my head there are all these thoughts like what will I say to the people in the store, how will they respond, will they believe me? Or they’ll tell me I broke it? But how can they not believe me? I’m not a liar and it’s not fair! I paid for that!
And this can go on and on. At least I now realize it when I’m in this rumination cycle. Well, most of the times, I hope… Then I’m wondering “what is wrong with me? Why can’t I handle this?”. Some of us tend to assume that WE do something wrong and the others are wiser and have sorted things out in a much better way…
I’ve been trying to sort things out too and somewhat tame that beast called the mind. Among other things, for the last couple of years I’ve been using the Waking Up app and a few days ago I decided to restart the introductory course along with my daily practice. In meditation 2 of this course, Sam Harris says that “as you begin to observe it you’ll notice that your mind is totally out of control”. Shit, it’s true! My mind IS totally out of control! And if Sam Harris says that in the introductory course, that must be a common thing. It’s not only me!
This is always so liberating. The thought that many more people than you thought are experiencing similar situations. And you can always try to do something about it, become better and more functional in your daily life. I still have a lot of work to do towards moments of freedom from thoughts. I’ve come to terms with this thing having no destination. It’s a never ending journey. But there is a lot of realization and growth along the way.