“Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
— Bruce Lee
Those of us who drive, be it out of necessity or convenience, have most certainly encountered our fair share of traffic jams, or worse, traffic accidents.
Highways are vast networks of concrete and asphalt which allow for a fantastical number of person-carrying vehicles to travel upon. The mind is a lot like a highway system, and our thoughts are a lot like the cars traveling along those neural lanes. The thing about highways is there are a number of “rules of the road” for which anyone operating a vehicle is supposed to abide. We operate as drivers on the road with a certain shared faith in one another that these rules will be observed and we reciprocate by ourselves observing the same rules. Failure on anyone’s part to do so often results in traffic buildup, travel delays, or worse, human fatalities.
These traffic snafus are further exacerbated by fucking rubberneckers.
So, there’s a wreck or a car is pulled over on the side of the road. It seems like an innocent thing, the desire to glance over at what’s going on. Let me just get a peek. Nothing about having seen the wreck will benefit your travels in the least, but you must know, you have to see it. And so does the person behind you, and the person behind them, and the person behind them, and so on and so on, so that three miles back people are gripping their steering wheels in a seething rage because they’re going to be late to work.
The mind is similar.
Our mind generates thoughts at incalculable rates. The mind is like the 405 at peak traffic. (If you’ve driven in Los Angeles, you know what this means. If not, everything you’ve heard about driving in Los Angeles is far more true than you can possibly imagine.) Even concerted effort would fail at trying to chase every thought we produce. The flip side of that is that one doesn’t even have to actively think to find oneself lost in thought.
Obviously not all thoughts are problematic. Many thoughts lead us toward myriad positive results. We think about and solve a problem in our job. We think about what we want to eat and we feed ourselves. We think about someone we love and we surprise them, in turn making them happy. Positive thoughts typically beget progress. And progress is always the point.
It’s the negative thoughts that trap us. These thoughts and the rubbernecking thoughts they engender are what stymy our progress. So, as our mind trucks along, spit-balling thoughts at us constantly, we can find ourselves either moving forward, in the flow, or we find ourselves in a thought accident, rubbernecking, and now entangled in a traffic jam of absolutely useless thinking.
I’ll never be a good writer. It took me asking my girlfriend to help me remember the word entitlement. For fuck’s sake. I’m an idiot. Look at me…an absolute fucking moron. Ew. Holy shit. Look at me. Is this what I look like? Why is my face so stupid looking? Why the fuck are there hairs in my ears? Why doesn’t anyone tell me I have hairs in my ears?! Obviously, no one tells me because everyone enjoys secretly mocking me. Everyone hates me. And look at this pandemic gut I’ve put on. I’ll never lose this weight. I’ll probably die of diabetes. Or maybe a lions will attack me. Are there lions here in the south? There could be lions here if the zoo lost funding and a disgruntled zookeeper just happened to not lock the cages one night. Then there would be lions. Or, bears. Bears actually live here. Holy fuck…what if sharks could breathe? Fucking great whites walking around on land? But I guess they couldn’t walk, so they’d what, flop around? Still, even if they flopped around, land sharks would definitely kill us all. I’d be first to go. And, I wouldn’t get to apologize to that lady I didn’t hold the door for at the gas station that time in Joshua Tree. I know she still thinks about that. Cursing the day I was born. That’s it! She cursed me. She was a fucking witch, and I didn’t hold the door because I was, fuck what was I doing? So that’s why sharks will learn to breathe and fucking eat us all. Do we have milk? I should probably go get milk.
That’s how negative thinking works. We let one negative thought get our attention and then the rest of our thoughts rubberneck around to the point that we’re stuck, doing absolutely nothing but making ourselves miserable with meaningless non-existences.
Being mindful is the hardest easiest thing to be. Driving is a good example of when we are mindful. We’re present. We’re observing the rules of the road and operating our vehicle safely, not driving in the goddamn left lane which is for passing only. For fuck’s sake, who taught you how to drive!? if you’re going to drive slow—meaning less than ten miles over the speed limit—then move your nowhere-going ass over to the right lane…and goddamn it, there I go again; rubbernecking.
Mindfulness is when we’re in a flow. We’re operating without influencing our operation. Like Bruce Lee says, “like water.” In the mindful state, we find our “way around or through” whatever it is we’re coming up against, which is most often ourselves.
However, mindfulness isn’t a one-and-done. Mindfulness is an always practice. The goal isn’t to attain some state. Our mind isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. Alan Watts said, ““To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.”
Maybe someone out there has achieved perfect mindfulness. I doubt it.
Nana korobi,
ya okiFall down seven times,
stand up eight times.
— Japanese proverb
I’m certainly still on the path of falling down and getting up again. I’ve accepted that. And that’s made the journey all the more enjoyable; all the more experiential.
Join me.