A tricky mind

I have this theory about distracting oneself from the problems at hand. It doesn’t work. I know people who think that avoiding any thought with regards to the issue will mean the issue loses its ability to wound or annoy or agitate and just go away. It doesn’t go away actually – why would it? Instead you relegate it to the deeper recesses of your mind so that what actually happens is that the worms of doubt and fear creep out in the middle of the night and grow into awesome proportions.

 I’d rather think about the issue till I fall apart with exhaustion and then go to sleep as well as I can. By immersing myself in the problem, I think about nothing else and also run out of variations to obsess on thereby freeing myself from further worry about the problem in a certain amount of time, the length of time varying according to the gravity of the problem.

I think my approach is intense but effective. Yes I do look like something the cat dragged in after a particularly nasty night out on town during this phase but I can, at the end of it all, actually move ahead. I get so bored of thinking about the same thing that I just stop worrying on my own. The journey to get to that particular destination however is not very easy. Yet it is better than distraction which smacks of deviousness and leads away from whatever it is that you are trying to get out of.

The mind is a very powerful entity. You can create a reality of your own that is so far from another’s reality that its almost as if you are living on a different planet. If I am responsible for hurting another, I feel miserable and guilty and am very hard on myself for days especially if there is no opportunity to achieve closure. I know people who never feel guilty though – it appears that in their reality, they are the most important creatures in the world and therefore while watching someone get hurt solely on account of them is unpleasant and perhaps even uncomfortable, it does not induce any sense of guilt whatsoever. Their reality is skewed to serve their purpose alone.

Even otherwise the mind plays endless tricks on you. Depending on your emotional stability, it can create illusions of various types. For a few days you are on a high, feeling invincible and unstoppable. Everything you touch turns into gold and every person who sees you cannot help but smile at your radiant effervescence. And then suddenly you find yourself dealing with a bad patch and lo and behold, you turn into a beacon of misery. You feel lost, unattractive and forget how to smile. Why is that? You know you are the same person you were a week ago. You know your strengths still exist. You know that all of life’s important things are still on your side. And yet you feel like a lesser being. 

The key to control the level of either sorrow or happiness is to limit your dependence on what the world thinks of you. Distracting yourself from misery or overindulging in something that gives you a high are both pointless in the long run. Yes it is nice to be lost in a haze of self-indulgence occasionally but you have to clarify and refine your mind and learn how to control your thoughts. It is then that the mind ceases to lead you and instead ends up becoming your biggest weapon. And that is one path I truly do need to explore from now on....