Better Thoughts #1
Imagine you’re in an old white frame house set on a hill in the Kansas plains. Wide open space, breeze blowing. This seems like the perfect spot for restful reflection.
Except that the doors and windows are wide open. People are walking in and out of your house. As you sit, trying to clear your mind and enjoy some peace and quiet, they talk loudly, turn on the tv, blare music from a playlist you don’t like, and go through your refrigerator. You ask them to leave, and some of them do only to re-enter from a different door. It’s pandemonium!
Finally, it occurs to you to shut the doors and lock them as you kick these people out. One group of people at a time, one door and window at a time, you rid your house of them, locking them outside. They bang on the doors and windows for a while, but eventually they leave.
Now, you have the peace and quiet that you wanted.
This ridiculous scenario is what too easily happens in your mind. You can allow too much outside noise, worry, and racing thoughts to run rampant, freely coming and going.
Essentially, you need practices to reclaim your better thoughts, set boundaries, and create space for your best. Over the next several weeks, I’ll share practical exercises and tools for turning positive mental flips, prioritizing input, and pulling out of the tendency to be a cyber-zombie. You can nurture better thoughts much more of the time. But it does take some work that gets done on purpose.
For today, you might be sure all your doors are closed and that the only guests are the ones you have invited.
Worth Repeating
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
-Albert Einstein
