The art of overthinking
Move over. I am the queen of this! No one can take that position.
If there is a muscle that could have been built until now by overthinking, it would be the most ripped. Or if someone sits and logs time on each of the activities taken up in these almost five decades of life, this would be a whopping winner.
This, most times gave something for my mind to be active with. When I trace back, I start to put some activity in my mind when in others’ company and blank out from that space. Say you are in a car with cousins whom you didn’t want to hang out with, but you are huddled to be with by the elders. How to escape from them? The only thing that can wander when you are wedged between two yapping girls is, voila, the mind. I remember doing that growing up. Take myself away to another space to escape the present. Thought it worked for me then, and I escaped instead of being in that uncomfortable space. I did know better. But not sure if that added to a habit that became “a habit of escaping the present most times.” This could be what it started as, if I now trace back. The heaven that I created for myself to escape here and now. Eckhart Tolle would squirm and might have to run for his money; if I start teaching “The Power of Not Now”, I am a master at it!
What is interesting is when I yo-yo between two spaces, attractive fantasies of all. Sometimes, it would be an unpleasant experience of the past or something to happen in the future. But rarely present, how interesting it is to reminisce about pleasant ones. I and myself won’t have anything to emphasize with each other, and sometimes we do “test things” or even gossip about them. So it’s mainly only that resentment and experiences that triggered not great feelings that come, and we both sit and mull over it. Talk over and over about it.
Once we are bored of that, we switch. Why not, isn’t it? We need some variety . Now, let’s get anxious. What if that happens? What do you think we would do? What if that is not at all there in sometime, say my nose, how would we breathe… Sho! Isn’t it? How would that be? An ever-pervasive warmth spreads over the shoulders and upper back. Wow, isn’t that warm and nice? Let’s be here and be anxious.
So this was the game we both were on until, one day, these two buckets of thoughts started merging. The power of “not now” took over the life. Someone is talking to you, I expected my other her to respond as I was busy with my past bucket of thoughts, not knowing she was busy with future bucket. Thoughts, thoughts everywhere …. not one thought but many! Abundance of them.
Exhausted…. we both gave in and started taking help to stack them all or to let them pass…. not easy. I guess we both are working and will be so until the end. We are no Buddha to sit below a coconut tree and have a halo!
