January 11 2018 No. 542
You Think You've Got Problems!
The important word in the above heading is "think" - we think too much about everything and it clogs up our mind so we don't see what's actually going on and we never do anything concrete about it... whatever "it" might be. Time to stop thinking and start living... one now at a time.
Think about the stresses, worries, challenges and anxieties that you were experiencing on May 27 2015. Yes, it's a random date but so are our imagined challenges. Everything passes - life itself - don't miss it while it's passing. Put today's challenges in their perspective by taking just 90secs to close your eyes, deepen your breath and clear your mind. Now, you're ready for now.
I think, therefore I'm not! Descartes got it wrong. Thinking takes us away from the here and now, it takes us away from experiencing and doing, it takes us away from being.
The 70,000 thoughts that you have rattling through your head today (according to the Neural Lab at UCLA) are designed to enable you make it through the day - they are the echoes of the programs you learned in childhood, the echoes of how you feel about you and your capabilities. They are not just designed to enable you make it through the day though, they are actually designed to stop you becoming immersed in the experience of the moment. If we had become too immersed in the beauty of a flower or tree, leaf or person we stumbled upon, whilst out searching for tonight's dinner, ten thousand years ago, our limited attentional capacity would be compromised... we might not see the tiger coming.
There are no tigers nowadays, yet our own thoughts make mountains out of molehills, they magnify the challenges that everyday life throws in our direction and transform them into anxiety and stress. That same over-capacity for useless thought then feeds off the imagined stresses that thought itself produces and we get sucked down the wormhole of our own thought. Madness.
Stop thinking, start experiencing, start being, start noticing, observing... start living.
Apparently the average human attention span has dropped from around 11secs to 6secs in the last decade... wonder if Twitter has anything to do with that? And, at present, we're hearing the beginnings of an outcry about iPhone addiction among young children... as if adults were any better.
Are you still with me? Do I still have your attention? Was chatting to a friend on FaceTime over Christmas and wondered what the incessant tapping noise was in the background... had they been invaded by rodents or bought a hamster that couldn't stand still?
No, her boyfriend had got a new PS4 for Christmas - the noise was him constantly clicking on the controls - and he hadn't torn himself away from it since. Talk about device addiction!