No, But I Want There to Be
On the mind that goes looking for a problem when there isn't one
Someone came to the Friday support call with what he called a real noticing from earlier that day. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He wanted a map.
I asked if he might be trying to figure it out.
“Of course,” he said.
That’s when we started working with it.
Wanting to figure something out is itself the signal: it assumes you don’t have it. So I invited him to let go of wanting to understand.
There is a question I often find useful:
Right here, right now, is there a problem?
Not in memory. Not in anticipation. Right here. Right now.
He sat with it.
“There’s an irritation.”
I waited.
“No. But I want there to be.”
“That’s it. You found it.”
“Stop bloody ruining everything, Steven.”
We went around again. The setup is simple: the past is memory, memory isn’t reliable; the future is speculation, it doesn’t exist. All that ever existed is right here, right now.
Right here, right now, is there a problem?
“No. But I really want there to be.”
The mind, I’ve found, is something like a radar. Always scanning. What’s it looking for? Problems. Things to solve, things to prevent, things to manage. This isn’t a flaw. It’s a function. The mind wants to keep you safe. It’s devoted to the cause.
But when there’s nothing wrong, when a problem has resolved or the moment is genuinely clear, the mind doesn’t know what to do with itself.
The mind is like a middle manager in a company that no longer needs middle managers. Its whole job is to manufacture problems that only it can solve. When there’s nothing wrong, it panics a little. I’ve got to find something. Otherwise what am I here for?
He could feel it happening. There’s a slight frenzy to it, he said, like a dial turning back and forth, scanning. Oscillating between boredom and stress.
There’s the middle manager, afraid of getting fired.
“Oh my God.”
Nobody quite tells you this when releasing works: the problem that had been occupying all that attention is simply gone, and there’s nothing obvious on the other side of it. No arrival. No clear next thing. Just the unfamiliar quiet of a mind that has run out of its main assignment.
It can feel strange. It can feel like something is wrong, which is exactly what the mind will insist.
What he’d noticed earlier that day was real. Whatever had shifted, shifted. What remained was the mind trying to make something of it, looking for a thread to pull, a problem to carry forward. Not because anything was wrong. Because that’s what the mind does when it doesn’t have a better offer.
Right here, right now, is there a problem?