My now 11yo daughter was in a philosophical mood this evening, waxing lyrical about what makes her happy, what people don’t know about other people, and what ‘perfect’ means to her.
(I think it was all being hung, conceptually, on perceptions of Taylor Swift, but I couldn’t fully keep up, truth be told.)
Anyway, she’s feeling her way into the Innate Health understanding in her own special way, and decided that there were two types of happiness:
- The kind that comes from having a whole load of stuff, and maybe fame, too (which, she realises, does actually come with drawbacks)
- The kind that’s ‘just there’ and, crucially, is ‘always there’.
I’ll take that!
It brought to mind a conversation with someone—an old client—who’d noticed that they’d started to fret about an upcoming activity they had planned.
It was something outdoorsy that they usually enjoyed, but whenever the mind turned to it, there was worry; fear of things going wrong.
So natural.
It's those two greatest hits of the mind again (that we established recently, are actually one thing) in play:
- Trying to predict the future
- Trying to predict how we’ll feel in said fictional future
Giles P Croft
Being fairly au fait with the Inside-Out understanding, the client—or should I say their mind—was very much on board with this, and it was trying to rationalise its way through the problem (another of its greatest hits)!
“I know these things are just the mind creating stories. I know they’re not really going to happen. But that doesn’t seem to help.”
And it won’t.
Because the issue isn’t that these things are unlikely to happen – they actually could happen, you know?!
No, the thing is, that even if they did happen, we’d be ok whatever, because we’re built to thrive in the reality of the present moment.
The most terrible disaster could occur, and underneath all that, life would be living us, responding, coming up with solutions, delivering wisdom, doing what it does to keep the organism alive… and none of that has anything to do with the mind at all.
And we’d get through it and look back on it with yet more evidence to boot, of our Innate Health – what my daughter intuited was the kind of happiness that’s just there and always there.
So next time you spot the mind trying to rationalise its way out of a problem of its own creation, trying to stop you from doing something you’d quite like to do, rather than joining in and trying to play it at its own game, why not just leave it be… let it carry on doing its thing, harmlessly, while you carry on doing yours.
💟
Giles
p.s. the client went and did the thing, and had a lovely time, naturally.
Related
Giles P Croft
More on ‘pre-match nerves”