The Peaceful Act of Thinking

THE PEACEFUL ACT OF THINKING

Naturally I'm quite a thoughtful person. My mind is always a filled with a flurry of activity. A cascading waterfall of thought is always a-flowing. I'm always taking in as much of the world as I can and paying it as much attention as possible. I'm always wondering about things. I'm always caught up in a daydream, riding the blooming white clouds that pepper the sky of thought lining the circumference of my mind. The only time when I'm not thinking, is when I'm well and truly asleep, but even then I'm lost in some kind of dream, with my brain continuously whirring away, processing, imagining, perusing.  

I always think thoughts are such beautiful things. They're such an abstract concept. We think in images. Sounds. Words. Motion. We think without limits. A thought stems from the depths of your mind and only exists for a mere second, presenting itself via some internal cinema screen before vanishing entirely, to be as though it never existed in the first place. Our thoughts are private, only ours to know unless we choose to vocalise them and share them with others. They're the result of all the different kinds of processing your brain is doing every millisecond of your life, from birth till death. All the sensory input that's feeding it's way into your brain, and interpreted with your own unique perspective and viewpoint, or likewise all the sensory input that's already been processed and filed away on the infinite shelves of memory, ready to be recalled in another time, another place. 

We think in conjunction with the world around us. There's always two kinds of continuous electrical activity going on, two simultaneous worlds running in parallel: the life taking place in the world around you, a never ending sequence of intertwined and intersecting activity, and the unique life of thought, reaction, reasoning, processing, that exists in the core of your mind, and is a product of that world outside of your two eyes. The environment that surrounds us is always changing, so we change with it too. We're never poised to stop or run out of charge or be frozen in time. We're too hypersensitive to the world around us, too strongly influenced by it, too dependent on it. Our brains don't do static. They do stimulation. They need it. They crave it. Our brains thrive off the act of receiving new information to process, or likewise further processing the information that we already have, and coming to answers, conclusions, possibilities. Generating output. 

Thought is our own private means of making sense of the world. A place to throw ideas back and forth. A magic wand with which to dream. Test our hypotheses to see if they're right or wrong, and why that's so. Form opinions and stances. A drawing board with an endless supply of paper. A canvas to paint on. A way of getting to know who you are and the kind of brain you have. A boat in which to sail the seas of life and keep yourself afloat. A free pass to revisit any time, any place, any one, whenever you want, wherever you want. A decoder of the past. A crystal ball into the future. Some call the thought process conceptualisation. A predecessor to speech. Forming concepts, or thoughts, out of experience, data, observations. A way of making sense of the world. A way of understanding ourselves and who we are. A safe haven into which to escape. The only thing you ever truly have full control and ownership of. A special place, a secret retreat, that no-one else will ever know as well as you do, and no-one else can access like you can, because you're the only one with the key. 

My favourite time to think, is when I'm walking to and from places on my own. I find the simple act of walking is enough to distract the restless part of my mind, and give me ample time to ascend into my world of thought, or as Sherlock would say, my mind palace, and stay there for a while. It's a pretty nice place to be, especially when I'm feeling somewhat relaxed and relatively happy. I love thinking when I'm walking, because I'm constantly surrounded by ever changing sensory stimulation, thanks to the ever changing environment around me, and it keeps my thought processes alive, interesting, active. When I'm in that headspace, I find that I feel very at peace and at one with the world and with myself too. I like catching my trains of thought and seeing where they lead me, as do I like to use my thoughts as experimentation, because I'm not afraid of where they might lead me any more. 

When I'm walking around, I have my eyes open wide to the world around me, and I'm taking in every little thing that I possibly can and processing it in as many ways as I possibly can. I notice the foreboding clouds and the emerging vestibules of blue sky, and I think about how much I love that tone of blue, how it's my favourite colour. I also think about how someone might look at that sky and think it means rain is on the way, whereas I look at it and anticipate the sunshine that is surely about to break free at any moment. My eyes trace the lines of the architecture that forms a skyline silhouette, and I notice all the little details of the buildings in the city, and wonder who decided to put them there. I call my mum, and wonder what on earth I would do if she wasn't there on the other end of the line, always there if ever I need her. I pass people begging on the streets, and wonder what their story is, and what they will do when the night falls, and how even though I'm in motion and they're stationary, even though life may have dealt each of us a different card, at the end of the day we're just people. Just human beings. Neither better or more superior than the other.

I marvel at the way the ivy winds it way across the joints of different buildings, and then realise with a smile that I've clearly still somehow retained my childhood knack of being constantly amazed and in awe of the world. I see my reflection in a building window, and notice how I'm walking with my head held higher, my shoulders broad, my steps assured and confident, and feel amazed that I am that girl now. That my reflection looks like that, and it's reflecting not only how I feel on the outside, but also how I feel on the inside too. I hear all these different languages and find myself perusing about modern England, with its melting pot of international influence, and ponder what the future has in store for our small but mighty nation. I listen to Jake Bugg and it makes me think of home, and the old feelings I had when I was sixteen, seventeen, and on the cusp of something new, something amazing, the beginning of everything. I miss the comfort and familiarity, and knowing that you can run away as far as you want and change your address and never look back, but home will always be home. The only place you'll ever truly belong. 

I wonder if I should have spent that five pound note on that necklace, but then I remember the book I just read, and its central theme of life and death, and I realise that everything might end today, tomorrow, so maybe for once I should just live in the here and now and celebrate the very fact that I am alive in the first place. I think back to the hard times in my life, the personal struggles dotted here and there, and marvel at how I've managed to overcome it all and come out stronger on the other side. I think back to those times when I used to believe that if I stayed out all night and never came home, no-one would even notice I was gone, and how dissociated I felt from everything. Whereas now I realise how much love I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by, and how I've worked hard to earn that love, and share my own love in return with those I care about, and how much I love being alive and how much I love this world and its little pockets of wonder and beauty. I discover an enormous art store that I never knew about till now, and find it crazy that in a parallel universe this would be me, this would be my present, my future, my everything, yet I've somehow ended up following a completely different path and subsequently discovered a completely different side to myself. I listen to the songs that I know will take me to that place I know like the back of my hand, and I stay there for a while and wonder what if and wonder what, if anything, could happen next.

My thoughts, for me, are often the determiner of my feelings and actions. I feel lucky, in that 99% of the time now, those thoughts are mostly positive and optimistic, even if my life isn't always perfect. It was a conscious decision that's now become automatic, because I was so tired of the way I used to think about things, and how it made me feel, and the impact it had on my life. Your thoughts are an incredibly powerful tool with the capacity for great influence and effect. They're an extension of who you are, and where you essentially reside 24/7. You can't ever really escape that place, it's where you're always present, but it's not a confine, it shouldn't be a confine. Instead it should be some kind of paradise to you, a positive, encouraging, safe, kind, happy place to be. It's yours, no-one else's, and if your thought space isn't looking quite so good right now, and it's not really a nice place to be, then there's always a solution: when you're ready, take a deep breath and change it. Trust me when I say you can completely turn things around. You can bring in the decorators and do some re-decorating, an electrician to fix the lights and turn them on, a removal man to take away the negativity that you don't really need, a cleaner to give things a good old tidy up and re-arrange. Try on other people's perspectives that you admire, or who inspire you, and see the world through different lenses. When so much is dependent on your thoughts, and when your thought space is something of an internal home, I feel like it's just so important to care for them as well as you can, make them the best that you can, because they have the power to completely change your life. 

Your time on earth, your chance at life, isn't that long, when you put it into perspective. This universe is billions of years long. We're lucky to even get 60 of those years at best. We're lucky that we even got this chance at life in the first place. We're the select few that made the cut. You were meant to be here for a reason. I was meant to be here for a reason. And if we were brought into this world, and we're stuck with who we are, then I believe we have the right to be as joyful and happy and content and peaceful as possible. Don't let anyone or anything take that away from you, and the key to making that possible, is to make that little mind palace of yours a truly wonderful place to be. When you do, it can change everything. 

So in the context of thoughts and thought processes, I'd like to leave you with something to think about myself, aka. what might possibly be the most awesome thought related quote of all time:

"If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams, and you will always look lovely"- ROALD DAHL

Now let me see those sunbeams.