Being At Your Best
Just what exactly do we have in us that allows us to be at our best? For most of us, it can feel like that thing, whatever it is, is fleeting, sporadic, and undependable. Wouldn’t it be a relief to discover we’re able to be at our best more of the time than you may have believed in the past?
Be relieved, then, because that “thing” that lets us be at our best isn’t lightning that strikes from time to time. It’s the thing that lights us up as long as we’re alive. The times it seems like my best has gone missing, I know it hasn’t really gone anywhere because there’s nowhere for it to go.
Those are the times my mind is going too fast and is too full of thinking. In other words, those are the times I know I’m full of shit. Wisdom is always obscured by a brain that’s going too fast.
It’s not that my wisdom has gone anywhere; it’s just been covered over by too much extraneous mental noise. Imagine the view I’d have if I took a nice clean window and started pasting stickers over it. A couple of stickers and I still have a good view of the view offered by my window.
A couple more stickers and before I know what’s happened, I can’t see through the window anymore. My vision stops at the glass instead of seeing through it, and beyond it.
One of the most useful things available to me is to know when I’m full of shit. When I notice that, it’s clear to me I don’t have to pay any attention to what my revved-up brain seems to be telling me. I know that my undependable thinking will invariably start to right itself as soon as I let myself slow down a bit, and the only way to do that is to stop adding more thinking to the thinking that’s already going on.
That’s all I ever have to do; just let the thinking slow down, which is what it does as soon as I stop adding more thinking. Adding more thinking to too much thinking is like trying to put out a fire by spraying gasoline on it. It has never worked and never will work.
This is true for your wisdom, my wisdom, anybody’s wisdom. It can’t ever go anywhere, but it requires a bit of silence and stillness to come forth. Give it that, and bang! Your inner knowing is exactly where it always is, ready to be called on. And you’re ready to be at your best.
