It is 4.49am Saturday morning…I have come downstairs to the computer after lying awake for a while…
Poor Tom has been thumped and strongly nudged – by my hand, arm, elbow and foot – he tells me he doesn’t usually remember this happening when he wakes…it’s just the bruisies, dents…that give me away…
Anyway…I couldn’t sleep so I have decided to write my Saturday blog instead of lying there…poor Gizmo the cat is confused…me coming into the room where she sleeps usually means “food time” – but after expectantly mewing at my feet – even she seems to have registered that this is a weird time and not actually about her sinking her teeth into brown dried crunchy things that seem to make her world complete…
So…where has my mind being going…what is fizzing around in my little head?
A couple of weeks ago I worked out that my stressful thoughts mostly fell into two categories:
things I can’t control, and things I can’t know.
For some reason it felt helpful to work this out!
The things I can’t control can be about big things – poverty, famine, natural disasters, war etc – goodness this blog is a laugh a minute so far…
or about little things – delivery men not turning up when they say they are going to, numerous electrical devices going on the blink one after the other, me dropping something – and then wondering why I decided to have a tiled floor in the kitchen…Tom snoring…
And similarly the things I can’t know – what is going to happen in the future: how best to care for, protect my loved ones…
…and those things that bug me – crossword clues, whether I see colours the same as other people, odd socks in the laundry, people who never ring back…
And this morning…as I lay in bed…Tom snoring happily by my side… I was reminded of one of my favourite quotations – and so I thought I’d get up and put it in a blog…
…it’s by Anthony de Mello and it goes like this:
“Before I was enlightened I was depressed. After I was enlightened I was depressed, but I just didn’t care any more!”
To me this is the most amazing quote ever – I love it!!
I am very attached to the writings of Michael Neill, and, one of the things he says, that I find very thought provoking, is this:
there are an infinite number of thoughts, and the way things work is that thoughts are continually being generated…
…our minds are awash with thoughts…
…most of these thoughts our mind dismisses – doesn’t take seriously – but at some level we start to take our thoughts seriously, start to believe what we think… “she did look at me funny” , “my nose is too big”, “I will never get this done in time”, “I always forget things”, “everyone else always gets the breaks – never me” … and we all create our world from the thoughts in our heads… the thoughts we take seriously become our reality and we “live our lives from this level of consciousness” …
So to go back to Anthony de Mello … we all have thoughts along the “poor me” line, we all have thoughts about “the world is going to the dogs – things are just getting worse and worse”, “life is hopeless”, “life is unfair”…
…and… we all have thoughts along the lines of “life is extraordinary”, “life is amazing”, “I just feel so blessed”, “I can’t believe everything fell into place so perfectly”, “I feel so proud”, “I am moved to tears”, “I am in awe”, “I am humbled by others’ generosity, others’ courage”, “I have everything I could ever possibly need or want”…
…these are all thoughts…they are all there for the taking … whizzing around in our consciousness…
the question is – at what level do you want to live your life? What thoughts are you going to take notice of, take seriously, believe – because those thoughts will shape your reality… you can’t make yourself think any particular thing – there are people who make a living telling you that you can – they sell books about it, run courses on positive thinking – but it’s just a con ( probably a well meaning con – but a con nevertheless) … but what we CAN do is to let our minds do their thing – generating all these thoughts – some thoughts may not even feel like they are our thoughts – it’s more like we are living in a sea of thought and these thoughts don’t actually belong to us at all…
… what we can do … is notice the thoughts and choose which ones to take seriously – which ones to believe or even just choose to behave as if they are true or untrue and see what happens…
“After I was enlightended I was depressed, I just didn’t care anymore”…
…Gizmo has decided it definitely is time for food now…she has walked across the keyboard…I have deleted what she wrote,…it wasn’t fit for publication…
So time to feed Giz and see if I can go back to bed…any spelling / grammatical mistakes – or even if this whole post is pretty unintelligible – will just have to be forgiven as early morning-itis … I must learn where the spell checker is on the blog page…
Morning…I’m off back to bed… 🙂
