But Actually, I Am
Why you can’t stop thinking, and why peace doesn’t depend on it
The Friday support call opened with a group release on not being able to stop. Afterward a man raised his hand and said the part that had landed for him was the question of what he would do if he did.
“If I stopped thinking, I’d be at peace.”
He said he didn’t know what that meant. He wasn’t sure he had ever stopped thinking. Maybe he had. Even asleep he was dreaming.
I asked what happens when he tries to stop.
“Keep on thinking. Like, don’t think of an elephant.”
So I asked how it feels to believe that peace is on the other side of the thinking. He sat with the question. Then I said the obvious thing back to him: so that means you’re not at peace.
“At this moment, no. But actually, I am.”
Back up a moment. What did you just say.
“I am. Sitting here, talking to you, in this beautiful background. I’m at peace.”
He had put a condition on peace and had never once met the condition. He said so himself, before he contradicted himself. The condition wasn’t what was holding the peace off. It was what was holding his attention.
I asked whether being at peace was something he was thinking or something he was experiencing.
“I was thinking it. And now I’m experiencing it.”
Then, without a pause: “and that brings up another thought.” Then a question about whether a thing you think can also be experienced. The thinking did not stop. It went on doing exactly what he had said it always does, and the peace he had made contingent on its stopping was already running underneath it.
None of that got tidied up. Later in the same exchange he was chasing it again with his mind, and he heard himself doing it. “You can keep on going,” he said, “but I’m not going to keep it going.”
That is the whole turn. Not the thinking stopping. Him catching himself mid-chase and setting it down.
Sometime today, notice what you have made peace conditional on. The inbox, the diagnosis, the noise in your head. Then check what is here while that condition goes unmet.