MOTORWAYS OF THE MIND

I’ve been thinking… are we ever really taught how to think? i mean, we learn how to navigate this world as we grow up, how to survive and ‘think for ourselves’, how to communicate, how to problem solve, how to engage with the world around us… how to learn new information. We are even taught WHAT to think to some degree… but I don’t think at any point, and I can only speak for myself here of course… that I was taught HOW to engage with the constant stream of thoughts that flow through my mind every second of every day.

This may seem trivial, but I think it’s actually quite a big deal. Our thoughts create our own perceived reality in every moment. What goes on inside our heads will dicate what we do, how we do, what we have, who we are, how we see ourselves and others as and the rest, everything. Our reality is unique to us, no other person shares our mind or our thoughts… we all see life a little (or a lot) differently to the next person. It’s what makes us human. 

For example, I could walk into a party, say there’s 30 people there, music playing, drinks flowing, what have you… we are all experiencing the same environment, hearing the same music, seeing the same people, smelling the same smells…. but we are all having a completely unique experience within ourselves via our thoughts…. there may be similarities but never identical or even close to.

Our experiences through life creates our thinking and our thinking creates our experiences. They are intrinsically connected. PARADOX?

We can’t actually control the thoughts that flow through our brain. Our minds are like a highspeed motorway… a motorway that never sleeps. Every car that speeds by is a thought. There is simply no way we can conciously control the thousands, hell, millions of cars that show up and speed along this road every day.

And that’s absolutely fine.

The problems arise for me when I find myself walking amongst the traffic of thoughts. My tendency would be to get drawn towards those cars that do not serve me, that are populated by fear or insecurity or negative ideas about myself and the world around me. Those cars are the loudest, they roar past, big engines, demanding attention… let’s call them boy racers.

My natural behaviour would be to divert all my attention to these racers… i gravitate towards them, they are loud and brash and it’s like i run into the motorway, stopping traffic, forgetting about all the other cars, just so i can focus on this one loud, overbearing car.

I would get in the car, and by getting in it, that car becomes a monster truck and i would drive it, drive it forward, drive over other cars, completely take up the road and all space on that motorway…. I’m in that vehicle and that is my reality, i look around from that driving seat and it’s all i see and i all i feel…. i don’t feel good but yet i am still the one driving it forward. Being in that vehicle will affect my actions, what I do, what i say and how. I panic and try to fight my way out of the confinement of this car but that tightens the seat belt, revs the engine and pulls me closer to the angst.

I have not chosen to do this or at least I don’t think I have, i don’t know why I’ve been lured into these negative vehicles of thought, but I am.

But that’s just it…. it’s a thought. I have locked into a thought passing by on this motorway, i have singled it out, given it meaning and importance over the other thoughts, i have jumped straight in, pulled in by it’s noise and by doing so i have given it all of my attention, I have fed it and enabled it to grow and take up space.

What would be different if i could sit on the side of that motorway, watching all these cars pass by, the noisy ones, the quiet ones, the heavy ones, the light ones…. just observe them, doing what they do… come and go?

What would be different if I could take these cars that pass by for exactly what they are, thoughts and I could understand that just because they are passing by at full speed, loud and abrasive, doesn’t mean that they are true?

What would be different if I could just watch them flow and choose which ones I give my proper attention in the knowing that they are just thoughts and i do not need to react.?

What would be different? For me, a whole fucking lot.

I have started to step back from my thoughts and remain firmly on the pavement, watching them pass, observing them move. I’ve found actually having a visual representation of my mind’s motorway has helped me do this…

I had a real example of this this past weekend. I was in Amsterdam at a big festival. The sun was shining, music pumping, thousands of people living their best life and having fun. At one point as i was walking from one stage to another, a loud, aggresive and invasive boy racer of a thought came hurtling through my mind out of nowhere.

This thought was coated in trauma, it was thoughts of my mum, but not the thoughts I find comfort in, it was the memories of her in her final weeks, in distress and in pain. A thought that i felt had no right showing up as i walked through the sunshine at this festival in full swing.

The boy racer thought reved aggressively and as soon as it showed up my attention fixated on it, i ran out from the pavement of my mind and into the traffic, singling out this thought. In doing so, the other thoughts on the motorway started to fall off of the road and dissolve, it was just me and this ever expanding invasive traumatic thought car. I was no longer at the festival, mentally anyway. 

In a matter of seconds i felt myself falling off of the edge of a cliff and into this dark hole of traumatic memory… i had a sense of panic… i cannot deal with this right here, right now.

Then suddenly, i want to say the training kicked in, but there’s not really been any training, maybe there has? Who knows? But i suddenly became aware of the fact that this trauma thought, this loud, aggressive mental vision was not coming from anything around me… it was not tangible, it was a thought that had innocently shown up on my minds motorway and i had, in the moment, ran towards it.

I stood in the middle of this festival, telling myself, this is just a thought, THIS IS JUST A THOUGHT. It will come and it will go. I don’t need to give it my attention. I don’t need to create my own pain…

As i did this, the sharp edges of that thought began to blunt and in a few moments it was rapidly dissolving into the sands of my mind… and new traffic started to resume on the motorway once again….

I’ve had this awareness of thought for a while now but this example was very powerful for me… i think down to the sheer heaviness and darkness of the thought that arose and how almost effortlessly i was able to dissolve it.

I don’t always operate as efficiently as this. On a day to day i still get riddled with feelings of insecurity at times or loud limiting beliefs or anxious thoughts that linger and i’m not as quick to take my torch off of them and look elsewhere… but i know I’m getting better, step by step, little by little.

So much of our woes come from our thinking. So much mental sickness comes from believing our thoughts to be true.

Life is hard enough, we do our best with the thinking that we have available to us…. so why do we allow that thinking to beat us up and wear us down from the inside?

For me it’s because i simply knew no other way, i didn’t even know there was anything to know or that i didn’t know what i didn’t know. It was just the natural process of thinking. Learning to observe my thoughts, growing an awareness of my thinking… these are the key things that are freeing me from own mental chains.

In the words of Syndey Banks, ‘It’s not what I am thinking, it’s that I am thinking’.

Deep it.