Tour Guide, The Hague, Netherlands
| 4 mins read
Imagine your mind is a forest. And you try to get off the beaten track. And you walk through thistles and thorns and basically all you want to do is go back to the main road. But if you don't, the second time you take that "path" it's going to be just as hard. After twenty times though, you might have squashed some nettled and bushes. After a hundred times, maybe there is this defined mud path. A thousand times and it might be a broad forest path. A million times and it becomes a highway.
Thoughts are like that. Habits too. Have them once and they are awkward and unfamiliar and forced. Have them a million times and you're off beating yourself up or hating yourself and you won't even realise you've been on and off 6 highways with negative hateful thoughts about yourself.
Learn to get off those highways. Start with just realizing you've been on highways. Usually, in the beginning, you'll be in a deep pit before you even realize what happens. After you become conscious of them, try stopping when you hear yourself think something negative about yourself. With practice, you will not get on the highway automatically. And you can start selecting consciously which thoughts are helpful and which ones are not.
Meanwhile, get off the beaten path. Praise yourself for getting up in the morning. For every pro-active moment in your day. The moments I'm talking about can be a second.
If you're aggressive: For every moment passed non violently.
If you're anxious: For every moment passed peacefully.
If you're depressed: For every bit of colour, you do manage to see in the bleakness.
Focus on nice things: Warmth or coolness or any weather or just a moment of not being sad.
When you focus on that, you see more positive things. It feeds itself, just like negativity does.
Praising yourself helps. But it's not your skills you need to start liking. It's your personality. It's harder work than a fulltime job. And sometimes it's healthier to leave it be. Let it go. Just start realizing it. Take little steps.
Is it THAT simple? Well. If you're optimistic enough to define that as simple then the answer is yes. But don't fool yourself. It's a shitload of hard work. And there's no shortcut.
To stay in the metaphors, imagine, if you will, that your mind is a garden instead. You need years to get a proper garden with flowers and full-grown vegetables and fruit trees. It's not going to happen overnight. (Unless you have magic beans. But Giants are a risk.) You just need to water this garden and fertilize the soil, give it the light it needs to grow and the darkness it needs to rest. You need to remind yourself all the time of the end goal. Results are satisfying but take time. Give it time. And the hard work.
You'll start liking the process because every day your garden looks a little better than the day before. And if you have a bad day or a terrible day, all is not wasted. Those flowers and fruits and vegetables will still continue growing after a horrible storm. Small setbacks are just that. Setbacks.
Not the end. Maybe this season's crops won't come out as you planned. But continue to give it love and time and care and it will all pop right back up. Sometimes, it turns into an even more beautiful garden than you might have planned.
Mindfulness helps. And I know it sounds like a cliché. But once you learn to accept your thoughts and stop resisting them, they'll stop having the urge to push themselves in your face because they feel ignored. There're a few apps (like Headspace in English, VGZ Mindfulness Coach in Dutch) that might help you. They did for me.
I've given thought a lot of thought. I've shared this stream of consciousness with a few friends when they needed to hear it. And now, after ages of silence, I wanted to share this with more people. Because it might help just this one lost soul. And that will be enough. Any of your own thoughts are most welcome down below in the comment box, I'm curious as to how you experience thought.