the windmills of my mind

I remember we sang that song in elementary school music class. Round like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel. Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel. Or at least that's what the lyrics are in my memory.

These past few days I'm feeling acutely aware of the carousel of my mind, and its tendency to exaggerate, jump into the future, and overly dramatize what it tells me. I suppose this is the 'opportunity within the crisis' of the end of my relationship. My mind has plenty of fuel to keep it active and freaking me out: those thoughts that only surface when I feel bored, rejected, abandoned, etc.

So like the sailboat I saw on the ocean in St. Petersberg a few weeks ago, I've been engaging in constant course corrections. That mind o' mine is clever, and sometimes I don't even notice it has slipped into a story again until I realize that I feel like crap. But when I do finally notice, I take a breath, reorient my awareness into the here and now, and I feel fine again.

Just now, I was trying to get some work done, and I heard a soft little murmur in the background of my head predicting a bleak and lonely future and trying to drum up some support for its vision. When I turned my attention to it fully, and asked it to assess our present moment and see if anything was lacking, it sheepishly slinked away. But I tell you, not 3 minutes later, it was back, testing the waters again! Little bugger. I gotta admire its tenacity.

So the journey continues, along with the various voices narrating it in my head, each seemingly with its own agenda. But what is new this time, that I'm really liking, is that the ones that sound like Eeyore can't seem to persist in their gloominess when I ask them what they need that they don't have right here and now. They hem and haw and settle back down pretty quick.

So the course corrections only take a few seconds nowadays, whereas I think when I was younger it may have taken days or even weeks to realize which story was hurting and call it to join the present moment.

I wonder if at some point, this process will become automatic, and happen under my conscious radar. That would be cool! I'll let you know.