Yesterday morning, I was sitting at my desk in the 67 second gap I had allowed myself between doing tasks and coaching a client online. In the few moments I had to settle after drinking half a cup of tea, I could feel my body attempting to breath as it trembled into a seated posture. Simultaneously, my hand moved to my mousepad to open my coaching notes so I could tune into my client’s needs.
It was at this point that I asked myself a genuinely new question:
When do I, actually, ever rest?
If my mind was a person - which in a way, it is - it would be the sort of person I coach. Specifically, it would be that type of highly geared achiever who never stops, unless they’re asleep. Animated, restless, vigilant, able to help others but never quite themselves.
If I was coaching this person, I’d advise them to cast an amused eye at their way of thinking about the world - and I’d advise them to do that every day for the rest of their life.
Because I am in the privileged position of being an anxious overachiever myself, let me give you a sense for what it’s like inside this type of mind (if you don’t know already):
When it’s not directed towards solving other people’s problems, my mind is constantly scanning for problems and thinking about how to solve them. Always starting from the perspective of what’s not working, it generates ideas about how to organise things better, makes proposals, argues with itself, raises concerns and floats new ideas that cancel out the original ideas. Sooner or later my mind gets excited, believing it has a new angle.
At this point it will have me jot down the idea on Evernote or the back of an envelope and for a few days this will join the other notes on my desktop waiting to be actioned, until the day comes that I bring myself to purge them and chuck 90% of them in the bin. Nothing significantly new happens. Life carries on and I do the things I do. Change continues in its own mysterious, underground way.
Someone once said the definition of madness is to keep doing the same things and expecting anything to be different.
So let me direct myself towards what is really happening here:
My mind’s M.O. (like everyone’s) is driven by a few core beliefs, devastatingly simple in their power to shape my universe, one of which is: life is f*cked, with the inevitable follow on: if I think hard enough about it, one day life will be ok.
This is where my mind lives and what it eats for breakfast and dinner. It is a permanent way of being, like the War on Terror or the Jacobin revolution. Its view of the world is that we are not yet there - the good times / success / relaxation are always a few steps ahead - and it has plenty of data to back this up with.
Looked at in this way, the mind is a problem solving machine that never solves its fundamental problem (the problem of being a human). It never solves it because this brilliant mind is not clever enough to notice that it is in no way interested in solving it, just as no government ever really expected or wanted to win the war on terror.
A mind that lives inside not yet successful or not yet happy or not yet ready to relax will never know those things, because if it did it would become something else - it would lose its identity. And no one hands over their identity without a fight. My mind would rather die than change. It would rather be at war.
It’s not fair to discredit my mind completely - it can do amazing work when it has a clear task. Like a restless dog it needs to be taken on a good run twice a day, but it needs a strong and capable walker. Then it can help other people in all sorts of ways. But it can’t solve itself.
In the face of this, my job is not so much to stop thinking (impossible) as to watch in detailed fascination as this identity does its thing endlessly and continually, while life does its thing quite separately - and to note that my mind is also part of life, but not the one that is really in control.
As I do that, things loosen up, events unroll in an unpredictable but more harmonious way, net carnage is minimised and my shoulders relax a little.
Two quotes to finish with, one from a therapy website someone recommended me (despite its weirdly ugly graphics):
“The very nature of the mind is to be in confusion…. It just doesn’t go away. It never gives you a break. When you understand the mechanics of the mind you can redirect the energy that fuels it to go beyond it.
“You are responsible only for one thing, and that is to know yourself. The miracle is, if you can fulfil this responsibility, you will be able to fulfil many other responsibilities without any effort. The moment you know who you are, a revolution happens inside and your whole outlook about life goes through a radical change.”
And a personal favourite of mine by Bernardo Lischinsky, aka ‘Satyananda’:
“To reach effortlessness with effort is really quite difficult.”
I don’t have anything to add to that.
Your description of the machinations of the thinking mind is so good I could feel the agitation it causes. I think we all suffer from this in varying quantities. My mind often wears me out :) My old Zen teacher used to say the mind makes a good servant but not a very good master. I'm not sure I like the master/servant thing but I get what she means.
I feel like my mind is always trying to protect me and sees that as it's job hence it's frantic effort. But it seems like the most helpful solutions arise independently of all it's effort from the spaces between it's effort.