Let us talk about earworms, shall we?
You know those annoying songs or stupid jingles that can get stuck in your brain and leave you a quivering lump, helpless in the face of its endless looping? (My trick is to sing O Canada, that’ll pretty much knock anything out of my synaptic mouse-maze).
In a slightly different incarnation of the earworm, I often find myself with someone’s random sentence niggling away at me. It’s not quite as annoying as the ol’ ear worm, but is effective for other reasons.
Over the Christmas holidays the topic of regular walks came up. Admittedly, I was whinging a little…just a little, mind you, about extenuating factors like rain and time and my other usual reasons for random avoidance. The young woman I was conversing with dropped a casual bomb into my brain when she said,
“At some point, you just have to rip the Band-Aid off.”
Well, shit.
This morning it was a dark and cheerless monsoon; not a particularly inviting non-dawn. But I thought about that comment, strapped on my happy turquoise Nikes (and bam!) as fast as you can rip off a sticky plaster, I was out the door.
I returned energized and grinning.
Something similar happened to me years ago. Kevin and I were standing in the bathtub warmth of the Sea of Cortez, our VW parked on the beach behind us, when a bleached-out hippie-dude walked up. He mentioned sea snakes. I replied with my usual rant about my deathly fear of anything that made a speedy S-shape. His blue eyes looked directly into mine as he said,
“You should change your thinking on that.”
His words have come back to me over and over and over. That man gave me such a gift. I discovered that I had/have the power to believe something different (this is not to say I’ll be sporting a pet python any time soon. There is, after all, a healthy fear required of things that can kill you, but I can now look at a picture of a snake and not go into a full-on-cold-body-sweat. Baby steps, people. Baby steps).
But our thinking is simply what we choose to think. We do not have to be ensnared by words that no longer work for us.
Meditation has given me a powerful tool to observe my thinking. This, I assure you, is not always a welcome thing. I can watch my mind happily squirrelling along on the most mundane and limiting trail before I wake up and suggest to my brain that perhaps we’d like to change to a different track.
We are not our thoughts, and yet, we are our thoughts. Being aware of what mental chatter is filling our head is the first step to powerful change.
It is also a reminder to choose our words carefully. You never know what earworm you might be planting in someone’s brain.
Let us be kind. It’s oh-so-hard to rewind.
Nice one again Colleen. Like a tune-up for me. Keep um coming. Sometimes I feel like Groundhog day, like, how many times do I need to be reminded, and your blog is such a wonderful part of that process. And I love the kind/rewind thing. Very good one.
Thanks Mare 🙂 I’m with you on the Groundhog Day theme. I’m like the directions on the shampoo bottle. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Only difference with me is that it should say, Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat!! I know I probably repeat myself endlessly on this blog too, but I continue writing and saying these things in the hopes that it will stick. One must keep hoping right?
I’ve been practicing banishing thoughts of a certain nature lately. Each time the thought of a Certain Person From My Past comes up, I think of a tree. I’ve been through apple, pear, peach, and banana (okay more like a plant). It’s been fun to see which tree pops into my head and a good technique for changing my train of thought. Trains can get used to repetitive tracks and I’m working on being more than a one-track mind woman. 🙂
And that’s how I’ve started 2014. So far it’s been a great year. and now I write this from the airport, on my way to Kelowna, so life is pretty much A+.
Way to switch tracks Elinor! That’s a good trick. In the wonderful book, The Brain that Changes Itself, Dr. Doidge suggests switching dominant hands for repetitive tasks, changing routes to work, even moving the cutlery drawer, just so that we can keep laying down new and different tracks so we don’t default to auto-pilot. I’m going to guess he’d approve of your plant plan.
Gotta love an A+ start to 2014!