On Thinking

       

It’s interesting to see how many people let their thoughts pour through them into the endless expanse of Mind without noticing what goes or comes…unless, of course, a particular stream of thought goes only around in circles. It never leaves; it just circles around in a morbid cycle. It is neither new nor does it get old, and it is never instructive or inspirational. Such thoughts become either aimless or obsessive, and the people caught in them become in danger of living one of Socrates’ “unexamined lives.”

Save...or sink...

Our thoughts will either save us or sink us. If we are willing to think hard thoughts and let ourselves be unsettled and uncomfortable, these thoughts can ransom us from falling into watching opportunities pass us by through inattention or the unwillingness to act on what is ours to do. And the fact that we are alive tells us that there will always be things that are ours to do. Some buck will stop with us. It cannot do otherwise.

drift...

The power to concentrate our thoughts is the greatest talent we have. If we cannot or will not put our thoughts together in a workable flow, we will almost never complete anything and…worse…we will be subject to drift, to give up control of our own lives. It is not failing in our efforts that becomes a problem, it is in not making the efforts at all.

responses...

We cannot control everything; we know this. There will always be people and circumstances that will not do what we would like, and sometimes some of the great tides of life will sweep us up in movements we had not planned on, at least for a time. But we always have control over one thing…our thoughts. We really can initiate our own mental restarts wherever we find ourselves, and we can control our responses to what is going on around us. We can re-affirm our lives, or we can give our power away completely.

In the world of our own minds, we have total sovereignty. No one can take this from us; we can only give it away.


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