You are not your thoughts

The mind is a noisy place

Most thoughts are uncaused. Thoughts flit into awareness without effort and evaporate just as easily. (“Should I learn to unicycle?”) Others are a reaction to specific stimuli: a familiar aroma, an overheard insult, an unfamiliar word in your path (“Pareidolia”).

Both can lead to kinetic mental pinball. The chirp of a broken mug on a diner floor, sparks a note in a Belle and Sebastian song, which plunges you back to high school art class, a humiliation in gesso, and the feeling that soaks you in embarrassment decades after the fact, as a waitress asks if you need a top up on your coffee.

Weightless thoughts can still pin you down.

The fact that you can observe the “voice in your head,” means you can’t be that voice. You are on the other side of the glass. You are not your thoughts.

Distance lets you accept thoughts for what they are: material for consideration. Let them turn from gospel to gossip. Thoughts aren’t your boss. Let them do what they must. Return to yourself. To now.

Order some French toast for the table.

When you heft a thought from the other side of the mirror, they weigh absolutely nothing at all.