Saturday, March 10, 2012

Keeping Up With My Crazy Brain


Ever have a day where there are 50 million ideas floating around in your head needing to get out on paper, but none of them will stay in the center of your focus long enough to get it written down? That is my brain. All the time. My mind is always going either a million miles an hour, or not going at all. I have been trying for days to get a new blog post written. I have 12 different documents open, each with a paragraph or two to start them, but no ability to finish them. Every time I pull one up to work on it, 7 new ideas pop into my head and I can't remember what I was trying to say about any of them!

And people wonder why I always say I am crazy! Its bad enough that my brain seems to be wired differently than that of most people, but then it operates at such a fast processing speed that I am constantly racing to keep up with myself. When you already don't think about things in the same way that other people seem to, having a brain that operates faster than your mouth (or your fingers) can make communicating your differences a little bit tricky. But when the brain shuts down and decides it is taking the day off, well that leads to a whole different set of challenges.

I really do like my brain, most of the time. It is very absorbent and pliable. I can easily wrap it around ideas and concepts and it can soak up information at a respectable rate of speed. I do believe I operate with a different processing system than I am apparently supposed to have, but I am learning to enjoy it now that I work with it instead of trying to make it perform functions it wasn't designed for. Now if I could just get it to focus!

Slow down, take a deep breath, center yourself. I used to do that before every test in college. When most of the other people in the room were trying to cram that last few seconds of studying in, I was sitting quietly with my eyes closed, desk cleared. I would use the moments to focus my brain to the subject at hand, not the subject matter. Maybe that can help here. Well, then again, maybe that is a bad idea here. Since the focus of this post is my lack of focus, finding my focus might defeat the whole point. But it is something I am working on. Along with the 50 million other things I need to work on. Its a good thing that I see my life as a work in progress, otherwise I really would be crazy.

2 comments:

  1. yup...happens to me often...too many things on my mind...like photographs in my mind that need to be posted so i can make something out of it...the brain is such a mystery to me...L O L...i like your blog, Mother dear...

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  2. “When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful. You are feeding them energy because you are not seeing them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them.”
    ― Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation
    Practice focusing on your breath, let your thoughts run like the horses in the meadow, no saddles, no bits, bridles or fences. Don't judge, good or bad, don't follow, let them run, focus on the breath whenever you get lost following one of them. Eventually they will calm down and come in for the good oats(thoughts) like forgiveness, generosity, compassion and freedom from judgement that grow in your pasture/mind.

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