Day 28

Day 28 – The mind gets cluttered. That’s what it does. For me, this shows up most frequently fas indecisiveness. I may have mentioned before that I have a note to myself on my desk that says, “practice small acts of decisiveness.” It really helps. I also tell myself, “leap before you look” and “first thought, best thought.”

It all means the same thing, go from your gut. Not that the head is wrong, but it gets in the way.

Allen Ginsberg developed “first thought, best thought” as a way of embracing writing with immediacy, bravery, spontaneity, and presence. Kerouac said that writing this way reveals “the actual workings of the mind during the writing itself; you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way.”

To untangle and prioritize my thoughts, which were causing undue urgency, also known as crippling anxiety, I wrote down in one sentence what I needed to get done today. I put aside writing and teaching, because that could do those in the evening, and focused on my trip. What is the main goal I need to complete? Here’s what I wrote: To be completely prepared for my trip to Berlin.

Then I wrote one action I could physically do to get me closer to achieving it. I started to write down, practice german. I mean, it makes sense, but can I get on a plane without practicing german. Yes. What could I not get on a plane without having done. Having packed! That’s what I wrote and that is what I got done today.

 How simple and yet, what I needed to do didn’t come to me until I pushed the competing and confusing “I shoulds” out of my head.

I sometimes find it hard to get what people mean when they say “just let it go.” They’ll direct this advice toward anything from an addiction to obsessive worrying to irrational fears. But how do you let go of thinking? Or, how do you let go of paralyzing procrastination caused by overthinking, that is, how do you let go of not doing something.

This exercise of writing down my goal and one thing I could physically do to reach it helped me, because when I swept the “shoulds” aside, it let the next actionable step stand out like neon.

There is thinking and then there is looking at your thoughts.

About letting go, I don’t think it every means doing nothing. It should not suggest one stops moving. More like, leap before you look. But it also, it also doesn’t have to mean move yourself to another country. Tara Brach says in one of her talks about letting go that it isn’t good or bad, it just is.

Instead of should, it is a type of letting be.