A Member shared his experience in a way that was helpful. He described the part of the mind that endlessly finds challenges for us to solve. Solve one and it moves to the next. Sometimes it bundles several together, so that we can prove to ourselves how capable we are for handling them all. And while it sets the challenges, it also judges us for not having fixed them yet.
What he has been practising is noticing the voice as it happens and naming it. His image for it is useful. Whenever he puts that part of the mind in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, he will always be unhappy. When he moves it across to the passenger seat and puts his highest awareness or intuition in the driver’s seat, it no longer has any power. He said that from there it becomes funny, and that he can physically laugh at things that before had seemed very large.
Two other Members recognised the same habit in themselves straight away. One said that if he didn’t have any challenges, he would create them. That is how he got things done for a long time, and he is now holding himself back from doing it and letting things take their own course instead. Another said he had thrown challenges into his own space for years, and that letting go of the creation of challenge is what has changed his year. He described the result as getting back to basics, with fewer things to do and a team that is running well.
A third Member offered a way of handling it that he has been trying out. Rather than sorting what arrives into challenges and opportunities, he gives everything one name and calls it a “situation”. Good, bad or indifferent, it is all just something we are going through. He has found that it takes some of the energy out of it, because the word challenge puts the energy there in the first place.
A Member then asked the room what everyone does for recreation, because he wanted to know what the rest of us get up to outside of work hours. The answers were varied. Golf at 3pm today, softball, and walking the dog. The gym most mornings, a bike ride to a park and a coffee with a friend afterwards. Martial arts before a broken back, and movies since. Squash, badminton, skiing at every opportunity, hiking, a lapsed pilot’s licence. Racing open-wheelers. A jet ski and motorbikes.
What I noticed is what several of them said about why they love it. One Member had taken a dirt bike he had rebuilt from the ground up down a fence line on a friend’s farm, over gravel and sand and whatever else was there. The only thing he was thinking about was what was in front of him. Nothing else. Another Member said the same about riding a motorbike, that his mind is on what is in front of him and everything else goes away, and that it is a beautiful place to be. Another has been painting digitally and described it as somewhere to drop into, and had just come back from a weekend with no mobile reception at all, with fires and hikes and deep conversations.
None of them were describing an escape from work. They were describing the same state from different doors. The part of the mind that manufactures challenges cannot operate when there is only what is in front of us, when we are deeply present. It needs somewhere to go. Take that away and it goes quiet, which is why people come back from a weekend like the Member above described, feeling like a different person and cannot always explain why.
This is the same ground we cover when we talk about presence, only arrived at from another angle. Inspiration comes to us when we are present. Inspiration arrives in presence which can often be in the shower, when we are not thinking about anything in particular, and the reason is not that showers are special.
A Member shared something from a much harder version of this. A year ago he had a serious fall and broke his back. What he described was the moment afterwards, when he recognised that the fall had happened and that he still had a choice about what it meant. He could have gone to self-pity, stayed in bed and decided he could not do anything. He chose instead to practise letting go, and to ask what was meant to happen next rather than deciding it himself. He said that across the whole year since, he has not really had pain, and he puts that down to the state of mind he has held. He was careful to say he is still practising, and that he still sometimes goes down and has to pivot back up.
Another Member finished the session with the same idea. He plays table tennis on Monday nights, and had spent the season losing to people he used to beat. The harder he wanted to win, the more he lost. Then he decided he had nothing left to lose, so he stopped playing to win and played each ball instead. He stopped being annoyed when the other player got a lucky net or edge, because it had already happened and there was nothing to do about it. He went on to beat two players rated well above him. What he said about it is worth sharing. “No matter whether you win or lose, you have already won, because you are doing your best.”
So a question worth considering is, which part of the mind are we listening to this week. If you notice the next challenge appearing the moment the last one closes, recognise that it is manufactured. The mind that identifies with lack and limitation will keep producing them for as long as we let it steer. Move it across, and there is a great deal more room than we thought.
“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
