Putting The Breaks On My Mind

In the movie Ants, there is a scene where we see an orderly line of worker ants walking along in a tidy line. Suddenly a tiny leaf falls in front of one of the ants. He comes to a stop, looks at the leaf, and yells, "I'm lost!"  A calm, collected foreman steps up and directs the lost to walk around the leaf, and everything is back on track. I walk a very narrow path health-wise, so this movie scene strikes home for me. It does not take much for me to feel lost; my mind races at night. I can't get back to sleep. During the day, my tasks go unfinished my well-oiled machine is brought to a halt by some leaf in my path. I find it easy to feel overtasked. The routine of my life has been pretty steady the last few years. As I come out of my covid shell adding more activities, I yell to myself; I am lost! Sometimes it's my outside voice.

We need that foreman in our brains to guide us around often trivial impasses. Whatever we are doing that is spiraling out of control can best be addressed by mindfulness, how I find mindfulness. Taking a personal time out has helped me immensely. I have a couple of systems to accomplish my mindfulness. First, my breaking maneuver is the easiest. I take five deep breaths. I find it hard to get past two, but really five is magical. Next, I do guide meditations for ten to twenty minutes daily. I try and do it first thing in the morning. With fewer distractions comes better follow thru. Sometimes I do walking meditation when I take the dog for a walk. It's not a one-off solution. The effects are cumulative so try not to miss too many days in a row. Next is this blog post. I try and hit the updated weekly. I am not sure how well it is going to work long term. I am coming up on a year of weekly posting pretty soon, so we shall see how much mindfulness I can harvest from this practice. I like that I have a buffer in my mind that helps me stay calm and on task when something throws me off my schemes and plots.