‘Well, you shouldn’t make assumptions’, people sometimes say.

That’s like telling someone ‘You shouldn’t have thoughts’.

Sure.

Why don’t you stop them right now, stop their appearance, as long as you feel like?

For an hour, an afternoon?

Maybe a week?

Sure.

You know how effective that is.

So let’s talk about those slippery fuckers again.

Being fully emerged in the business of thoughts and thinking, as I am, I constantly revel about how amazingly clever this all works.

How there can be thoughts, period.

How there can be thoughts about thoughts.

How there can be thoughts about thoughts about thoughts.

And how we can totally believe we create and control our thoughts, how we’re convinced that thoughts are truly our responsibility, yet we’re constantly drowning in stories that leave us unhappy and lacking and not whole.

If it’s REALLY up to us, why don’t we simply stop the ones that fuck us up, right?

I mean: it’s like being robbed of sanity in pure daylight!

The thing with thoughts is that we all know they exist (or, at least, we AGREE they do), but nobody in the history of human bodies has ever seen one.

So they are real, they have an impact, but they are not really somewhere.

Now we always say that they’re in our heads, but lately I’ve started to realize that they’re actually all over the place, totally surrounding us, being part of us.

Just look for yourself: are you REALLY sure thoughts are in your head?

You know you’re having them, but the knowing seems to be more accurate than the location, right?

Most of us would say that thoughts are part of life, in life, but we don’t realize that they actually create it.

That’s why it’s so hard to get a full understanding or a complete picture of the nature of thoughts: we don’t recognize our personal lives as being built out of thoughts.

We don’t see or know that the world we’re aware of, is an ongoing creation.

And thoughts are its building blocks, the elements that make up the whole story.

The only way to deal with this (as far as I know) and not lose our sanity over the complexity, is to realize that our sense of being, the fact that we somehow know we exist, doesn’t depend on our thoughts.

You can be conscious and alive without thinking any thoughts, or being totally lost or identified with them.

In fact, that’s exactly what happens in between our thoughts, all the time, even just for the slightest bit of time.

We don’t disappear in those moments.

As a matter of fact: we all know times in our lives when we feel deeply connected and inspired, when everything feels effortless and natural, and there’s hardly any thinking going on.

Happiness arises when our obsession with thoughts falls away.

We can be aware of being alive and make that awareness our biggest priority, and from that moment on the relationship with thoughts will change.

Eventually, huge chunks of our personal story will fall away, and many thoughts that seem to torture or capture or dominate or diminish us, lose their power.

Your assumptions will be less impactful too, or even stop appearing.

And thoughts will simply lose their stickiness.

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(Photo by @freestocks, for Unsplash)