For my whole life, I’ve talked myself off one ledge after another. There’s a good chance you may have done the same thing. I kept doing it until I realized something about the essential nature of the metaphorical “ledges” I’ve found myself on.
Talking myself off the ledge
I saw that all the ledges were made up, and that it was my own thinking that was making them up. Of course, my role in this was completely innocent, but there was no doubt about it. I was the one both creating the ledge, and then suffering from continually finding myself standing on it.
The future, like all great unknowns of life, can’t be scary, because it’s unknown, remember?
A ledge was created each time I took a mental image of whatever situation I found myself in and then started to embellish that image with overthinking. I was taking a situation that on its own was completely neutral, and giving it the flavor of a disaster, a catastrophe, an accident waiting to happen, an unavoidable tragedy. Oh, and then I went one important step further. I believed my own “catastrophizing.” Which is to say, I believed what my thoughts seemed to be suggesting to me.
Humans do this all day long. We assign meaning to a thought about what we’re doing, we believe what we’re thinking, the thought takes on a significance it doesn’t merit, and then we’re off to the races. When I do this, it’s as though I’m time traveling, because without realizing it, my focus shifts from what I’m doing in the present moment to an imaginary version of the same situation ten minutes, or two days, or five years from now. I’ve traveled to an imaginary version of the future, a “parallel universe” that’s polluted by my own fears because it was created out of fearful thoughts. And if I believe those fearful thoughts, I suffer.
By abandoning the present moment in favor of an undesirable version of what the future might be, I’ve discovered I’m also abandoning a peaceful mind. The only place a peaceful mind resides is in the right now. Peace can’t be experienced in the future. Put that way, it seems to make less and less sense to leave the right now and go looking for trouble in an imaginary future, doesn’t it? Besides, the only future that’s scary is the one I make up in in my thinking. The future, like all the great unknowns of life can’t be scary because it’s unknown, remember?
It’s helpful to reflect on how much time I spend in these imaginary futures, and to remember that when I’m off in these futures, I’m not able to fully focus my attention on the business in front of me, i.e., the task at hand. I know I’m not unusual in this; we all do it regularly. I wonder how many hours of my life I’ve gotten back simply by not getting sucked into all the parallel universes and imaginary futures created by my thinking?
Ledges appear less and less in my life, and when they do I seldom find myself on them, having to talk myself off them. When the ledge seems real to me, some signal goes off in my brain, and I remember: if I’ve made up the ledge, do I really have to waste time talking myself off of it?
