Getting Outside of your Own Head…

Your life was meant to be lived, not analyzed. The best parts of your earthly sojourn lie beyond your capability to find them out. Love and God (which are synonymous), compassion, tenderness, kindness, peace, and joy all are experienced in your heart, not just inside your head.  Inside your head rests that great mechanism for analysis, which, if left to its own devices, will wear your ass out! So, at certain times, it is necessary to get outside of your own head…

The sphere we occupy has become a frenetic jumble of information doled out to an increasingly thirsty world obsessed with more and more gulps of information. We’ve lost the ability to just sit with ourselves absent electronic entertainment. We’re like the perpetual flicker of the television image, flashing from thing to thing in an ultra-passive state of inactivity! We wonder why we can’t sleep at night or sit for an hour with absolutely nothing to do. It’s a tuberculosis of thought minus the cough. We’re troubled and endeavor to think ourselves out of our troubles with a troubled and overloaded mind. It never dawns on us that the solution to our problem is found in our revery; in our quiet moments of clear thought. Yet onward we march down a road with a thousand forks, each promising a better existence; a nicer life.

It’s no wonder that a chance return to nature softens our harried outlook and delivers rest to our weary souls. In God’s creation we are as we were meant to be. We stand naked before the expanse of vegetation appearing random yet carefully placed. The innumerable trees ask for nothing but for our thoughtful observation. The majestic mountains with their symmetrical yet asymmetrical peaks or the shimmering sun lowering itself onto the gray, bubbly ocean speak to us in words we cannot form. They abhor our analysis and seek only to be enjoyed. All of life follows this sublime, experiential effect.

There is, of course, a time for our analytical thought, but that time has an end point. Otherwise we remain at work; a different work without break or lunch or shift’s end. We imagine we are accomplishing so much, but like the machine that runs around the clock, we finally seize and die. Our tasks have no conclusion, our thoughts never rest. Yet it is in rest and inactivity that we recharge. When we recognize, at last, that there is nothing we so urgently have to do, that we are finally free to accomplish.

It’s by no mistake that we feel the ever pressing urge to recognize the danger that may come our way, but our minds are too hurried to discern the real signs. We run from this and hide from that, never seeing what we were meant to see, but instead seeing everything else. We have an ideal that we fantasize, yet cannot reach it amidst the clamor! We want to love and be loved but have no time for it. We seek for peace but look for it in gigabytes of electronic mumbo-jumbo. We promise ourselves a rest after the yard is done, the meat is cooked, the house is cleaned and the final tasks have been wrapped up. Yet, to our dismay there is always another task, another job, another beckon for our immediate, rapt attention.

The most profound example is found in our children, who are really younger forms of ourselves before the information got to us. They have not yet lost the ability to turn on and off their thoughts in the spur of the moment. They can be engrossed in the Xbox one moment and lost in the fun of the playground the next. They are sure of what pleases them and pursue it wholeheartedly without worry or fear of some pending doom in the future. They don’t seek to arduously analyze their trouble, they simply ask for help. They haven’t yet falsely assumed that it is their lot in life to know everything that is going on at every particular moment. They simply exist with a joyful, exuberant confidence that they are always going to be okay. They have no factual basis for their belief, they choose rather simply to believe.

When you find yourself trapped in your own head, buzzing about from thought to thought, give whatever is eating away at you to God. Toss it away from yourself like you do when you accidentally discover you’ve grabbed something you’re not supposed to touch. The grasshopper that lights on your arm with his prickly feet and his foreboding tobacco filled tongue, must not be run through your high-powered processor, but clutched and discarded with all vigor! (smile) Neither would you spend an hour pondering why he chose to land on you. You simply dismiss the thought and return him to his natural habitat. You, being solely responsible for you, must also always seek to be returned to your rightful habitat.

Get outside of the confines of your own woefully limited thinking and look up or outside of yourself. Stop dwelling and rehearsing and ruminating and move on. How many of us have laid paralyzed in the morning, unable to sleep while being haunted by the possible disasters of the day, after finally deciding to get up, are immediately encouraged and blessed by the sanity of real experience? We look back upon our waking fits with a sort of embarrassment and shame. Getting up simply got us out of our own heads and worries and fears. So get up from the frightful, illogical horrors of your own mind and live. Get out there and see what is all around you. Know that wherever you are, God is there and that there’s nothing too big for Him!

The information age has certainly taken its toll on us, but it cannot overtake us, if we so choose! Make time for real things with real people in real life and escape from its electronic counterfeit. Turn off the news. Refuse the Facebook debate! Stop filling your head with predigested information and read a book instead. This life, no matter the age we live in, ever has the promise of new possibility, hand in hand with your God and mine…

Experience love and joy and peace and bliss. You can, you should!

Just some good thoughts…