I had an image come to me the other day of background tension as a sort of canvas upon which I was painting my life. All the color and shape and texture happens upon something which doesn’t really change, and are for that reason less lasting. It is like the canvas reaches out and destroys what I painted during the day, and does so every night.
To build lasting forms, lasting color, you have to create a stable substrate of relaxation, the deeper the better.
Positive thinking, for me, is paint I color into my canvas. But the canvas just erases it. Positive thinking does not work for me, personally.
But at the same time, the paint DOES have an effect on the canvas. Some ideas sink deep down and stay there. The canvas becomes a sort of sponge. So thinking DOES matter.
As one example, Reframing, for me, created a means of predicting the extent of my reactions in various situations, which in turn lessened some chronic anxiety within me.
Specifically, I found Martin Seligman’s ideas useful. He spoke about not making everything personal, not making a failure in one part of your life color all parts of your life, and remembering that failure is not permanent. Tomorrow is another day. Hope springs eternal.
And in subtle ways, much of the thinking and writing I do here helps. As I say, it is a PHYSICAL sense of my self that ultimately I need to learn to anchor in, to learn to inhabit for the first time. I need to learn to tie my shoes in a new way, to walk, to drive, to shower.
But there is a give and take between thinking and practice. Again: Bidirectionality. It is a useful principle. Motion is the universal, and all motion in this world is complex. So if you have mostly stainless steel in your mind–if you are an ideologue of one stripe or another–you are wrong about much of what you think. You are missing most of the world, and trust me when I say that the world would like you to learn to live in the dirt again, and swim in the rivers, and relate to the birds and their songs.
Resting in motion: this is the main aim of life. All the good stuff flows from that.