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Little Irritants.
The other day I woke up to the fact that I allow too many little irritants to spoil the state of peace in my mind. You know the kind; the little Yorkie yapping through the day unceasingly (or so it seems.) The teens next door alternating between hip-hop and gaming shrieks at max volume. The construction team over the road taking turns on a jackhammer, to the strains of Elvis’s, “I’m All Shook Up.” (I’m exaggerating.) In all this external chaos, I reflected on an ancient scripture; “Let us use the little foxes; you know the ones that nibble away at our grapevines…” (My translation.)
Be patient, I’m getting to my point.
The vine is the state of my peaceful mind. The little foxes are the external disruptions to my mind and finally, stolen fruits, are the reaction to my thoughts. These will lead to hostile emotions arising from my thoughts. The result is little irritants spoil the peace of my mind.
For the most part, I can do nothing about the irritants.
But I am able to take charge of my thoughts and the way I do this is; for a brief moment, I consider the thoughts that are arising in my mind, not the irritants, just thoughts about them. I let the thoughts leave my space. Now I’m living in a space that is ‘real.’ This allows me to focus on my life as it is and what I’m about doing now. My thoughts are not entangled with the past or engrossed in the future. When I began reading the words of Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now,” I found it difficult to grasp the concept at first, with perseverance, I eventually did. More importantly, I now began to apply it.
As a person, I was haunted by many aspects of my childhood, youth, and later adulthood.
Later I created many things in my life, of which I was not proud. These too, regularly pierced through my mind. Unawares, I was nurturing thoughts that would create feelings within me. Dependent on the severity and frequency of these feelings, they would result in disastrous changes throughout my life. Taking the advice of Eckhart Tolle I made a commitment to stop nurturing toxic thoughts, trading them for concentrating on what is happening now in my life. I no longer entertain backward thinking, I leave that to the past. Living in the now moment is a timeless fact.
“Who buries their heart in the sands of the past, faces barrenness in their future.”
I forget my past. I plan my future, but do not live there.
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