Our world has slowed down... let’s be quick to learn from it
I HAD an interesting conversation with a client the other day as they were planning to reduce working from home and ‘‘go back to work’’, alongside which their young child was able to return to nursery. The challenge they posed to me was ‘I know we have to go back to normal, but I want to keep feeling the way that I do, can I do that?’
Like many people that I have spoken to, while the lockdown has presented many challenges, one area had improved for them, their feeling of well-being had increased. No longer rushing from one thing to the next, stressed about work, life, kids, and a mountain of other things, their minds had quietened to such an extent that the pace of life had a slower feel to it, and as a result they had been feeling much happier in themselves. Understandably, they wanted to keep this, as far as they could.
It is easy to fall into the simple misunderstanding that it has been the circumstances of lockdown which has caused this new and welcoming feeling, and so when it is over and our circumstances return to what they were before, it makes sense to believe that it would disappear. However, what I have seen, time and time again, is that we simply have it all the wrong way around. This wonderful state that many of us have experienced over the last few months simply is a state that always rests within us, it is our natural state, a state that we simply enjoy when our minds are quieter. We can enjoy this state when our lives are busy, when we are stuck on a packed out train, or up against a deadline, or getting kids, ourselves and our partners out of the door. It is, put simply, a state of mind, not a state of circumstance.
What I have observed over many years, is that we fall into a habit of creating a busy mind when we are busy. We engage with the dialogue in our mind that continually rattles off our to do list joyfully adding more to it, with every busy thought that pops into our mind we create at least another five or 10, with each of those multiplying again, and then again. All of this extraneous thinking then leaves us with that feeling of pressure and stress, which we then innocently associate with the endless to do list, the looming deadline or the challenge of getting us all out of the door.
However, there is a simple solution. We have noticed what it’s like to live without the thinking. That lovely feeling that so many of us have enjoyed is simply us, without the ‘‘busy’’ mind, it is our natural state. The only thing that takes us out of it is the thinking that we are doing in any given moment. The ‘‘fix’’ is simply to notice the thinking that is taking us away and let it pass, which it does, naturally. As a new client said to me the other day: ‘‘I noticed that I was going down a rabbit hole of worry thought, it made me feel so stressed, but when I noticed what I was doing, it didn’t feel the same and I was able to pull myself out of it! I never knew I could do that!’’
The ability for us to notice what we are thinking, in any given moment, is a powerful gift and one that will enable us, going forward, to enjoy being busy, but with a quieter mind.
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