Preparing dinner, my wife and I review our days. She relates a phone conversation with a client who was so abusive that she began to cry. From only hearing her story, I get so mad that I go into a fight reaction: I’m jabbing my finger in the air, raising my voice, ready to go find the guy and give him the business. I’m getting vegetables out of the refrigerator. I jump up, fuming, ready to nail the . . . .
Bam! l actually gash my head on an open cabinet door! Amazing! He got me first ‑ and he isn’t even in the room! My emotion has so disconnected me from the real world (the kitchen, with its open cabinet door), that I almost need stitches in my scalp! Don’t you love that? My interior world has masqueraded so persuasively that I’ve reacted to my imagination as though it was the outer world. I’m dreaming, but I’m wide‑awake! (Well, maybe not awake at all!) I may not actually be delusional, but it comes pretty close.
My lesson — and maybe you can profit at my expense — is that my “monkey brain” (a nickname for the amygdala) sometimes runs the whole show. My “ghosts” can be so convincing that calling them “real” almost makes sense.
But it’s liberating to see them as mere thoughts (even if they have strong emotions attached). It’s very beneficial to stop believing that They Are Me.
They are not. They are mental events. They’re like squalls out on the lake, and I am learning when to haul in my sails.
We could call it "Watching the Storm."
We do not see things the way they are, but as we are.
Jewish Proverb
Walter Sickert told his pupils that they could not draw the human hand because they thought of it as a hand. And because they thought of it as a hand, they thought they already knew what it ought to be. Thus they did not look at the hand in front of their eyes, but at the hand in back of their eyes.
T. E. Hulme
Speculations
