Image credit: Photo by gutter on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I was recently reading a book on Buddhism and the Twelve Steps that describes a meditation exercise in which you label your thoughts: "desire," "aversion," "thinking." The author mentioned one woman who was surprised at how much of her thinking centered on desire: I want, I want, I want... Thinking about thinking? That's hot. Of course, I wanted to try it. Oo, right away, "desire!" But as my day progressed, I noticed: 1) that the exercise was really hard and 2) I spend most of my time planning for the future, specifically what I want to say in the future. I spend most of my time thinking about words.

When I'm not writing a blog post, I'm thinking about what I'm going to say when i do and how I'm going to say it. When I'm alone, I'm planning my side of the conversation the next time I talk to a friend. Or I'm just looking for the right words to smooth over a mistake I made or soothe the unsootheable self-critical voice in my head. I'm constantly rehearsing.

In one of the 12 Step groups I've attended, we would pick affirmations to read at the end of each meeting, and my favorite (in fact, the only one I can remember now) was: "I trust the future." I was learning to do that: learning to trust that my life would be ok with or without my marriage, learning to trust that my children would be ok even if I wasn't be perfect, learning that I would be ok even if I made mistakes. But in talking to a friend of mine after I did this little thought exercise, I realized that I don't trust the future entirely; I clearly don't trust that my words (the "right" words, the words that please people, the words that make me understood) are going to be there when I need them. And in this lack of trust I could suddenly see a very clear undercurrent of pulling at me: a need to please others, an insatiable desire to control the world rather than accept it and an inability to let go. I found I've learned to be a stage actor, but what I really want to work on now is improv.

What about you? What are your thoughts about? And where do they point you?