Sorting Through Our Tangled Minds
This morning one of my children told me, “I have so much going through my head I can’t think straight.” I tried to help him sort it out, but the thoughts were so random, disorganized, and intertwined that he could not even articulate his frustration. As he left the house, I wondered how he would function, how he would relate, and how he would accomplish anything today. It is impossible for me to enter the head of my son and help him sort through the tangled thoughts each pulling in their counter-directions. I would if I could.
Then it occured to me that I have my own tangle of thoughts, annoying strings of care that get knotted around each other. Sometimes I have trouble separating my own knots. Why do I think I can separate someone else’s? Each of us, in our own way must learn to separate the jumble of thoughts and emotions that compel us. Some of us do it better than others. Once we get them separated, we discover they are once again wrapped around each other. I can remember taking my children fishing when they were small. Other than the father/son bonding time it was usually not a pleasant experience for me. I rarely got my line in the water because I was so busy untangling the lines of my two boys. I kept thinking, “How do they do this so quickly and so completely?” Sometimes it would take me 15 minutes to untangle something they tangled in 15 seconds.
So it is with our minds and the threads of thought that run through us–a “To Do” list for work, worry about a child, guilt over something I should have done but didn’t, a home-improvement project that looms ahead, a lawn that needs to be mowed and no time to do it, the financial strain of college starting in the fall. These are just some of the strands moving through my mind this morning. The list goes on, changing and flowing like streamers in a fan. Each day new strands are added while some are finally freed or cut loose. Sometimes they get so crossed and wrapped around one another that all our thinking and acting is impeded. We simply want to shut down.
There are two life skills each of us must develop to avoid the complete shut down possibilities. First, we must learn to manage our thoughts, not to keep them separate from every other thought, but to manage them into an intentional weave that provides strength and order instead of weakness and chaos.
Second, we must all learn the skill of patience that is needed to set everything else aside and tend to the chore of untangling when necessary. The ability to take in a deep breath and let everything else go long enough to deal with the problems at hand is often difficult. What I’m tempted to do when faced with a knotty problem is to ignore it as if it is not there. Maybe, I think, if I continue with the weaving of my life the knot will disappear. The end result is often an imperfect and often grotesque strand that flaws my life for years.
