Can I Unwind the Bind of My Mad Motor Mind?

  My mind is like a machine.

Most of the time it does its own thing.

It’s very routine based and prefers to follow a specific pattern of thinking.

I can see why people often compare the mind to a record player that is stuck playing a scratched up record.

I do, after all, tend to think the same thoughts over and over again.

It’s not that I enjoy doing this, per se. It’s actually quite annoying and I wish that I could stop and turn my mind off, but I can’t.

Can I?

I am well aware that there are all sorts of books and practices out there that say you can train your mind to quiet down.

Many of these practices claim that you can actually switch out the old record for one that is more productive. But even if you do switch out the old record and replace it with something more ‘positive’, so to speak, the fact remains that there is still a record playing. And whether it’s a positive record or a negative record doesn’t really change the fact that there is bound to be a scratch in the thing sooner or later.

Which results in thinking the same thoughts over and over again.

Which results in thinking the same thoughts over and over again.

These thoughts can range from the mundane tasks of life to more universally important issues.

Most of the time, if not all of the time, I find myself listening to the mundane tasks of life – things that are really not all that important in the larger scheme of things.

For example, I often find myself stuck listening to repetitive thoughts about the list of things that I need to do.

Here is an example of a record that I listen to frequently:

“First I’ll do the dishes, then I’ll take a shower, then I’ll get dressed, then I’ll go to the store, I’ll come home and put the groceries away, then perhaps I’ll go get a cup of coffee, by the time I get back home I’ll make dinner, do some more dishes, oh and I should really clean the bathroom, then I would really like to make some banana bread…”

The thought of making banana bread gets to me to thinking about my banana bread recipe, which I am trying to perfect. “Should I try it with ¼ cup canola oil this time or do I want to make it how I made it last time? Let’s see…if I add ¼ cup canola oil I’ll have to subtract some liquid somewhere else, otherwise it will need to bake longer. Hmm…maybe I can reduce the amount of banana in the recipe by just a tad.”

Next thing you know and I’m obsessing over how to make my recipe even better and before I know it an hour has passed and I haven’t really done anything incredibly productive or useful to the universe at large.

I realize that when put under the proper light the mind is a beautiful thing. But for me it’s more common for it to feel like a frightfully maddening place.

It often seems as if my mind is controlling me. Like my thoughts are thinking me rather than me thinking them.

Maybe they are thinking me? I mean after all, technically I don’t even exist, right?

How can I be thinking thoughts if I don’t even exist?

I deal with this drama every single day. Constantly mulling over one obsession for as long as I can, tearing it apart into pieces, which eventually leads me to the next obsession.

I move from obsession to obsession to obsession, over and over, again and again, on and on…you get the point.

It is truly maddening.

I wish that I could unwind this bind. But maybe this is just the way it has to be.

The mind is, after all, a highly complex computer-like machine that thrives on solving puzzles. And it doesn’t really care what the puzzle is. It can be something as unimportant as whether or not my banana bread will be better with ¼ cup canola oil or something far more useful and advantageous like Einstein’s theory of relativity.

To the mind there is no difference in solving a mundane problem than there is in solving a universal problem.

It just wants to solve whatever ‘problem’ is there.

But it sure would be nice if I could command my mind to think about something more productive than banana bread and dirty dishes.

Perhaps I can?

But what is productive anyway? I mean, it’s all relative right?