The Mind Will Find One
On the habit of scanning for problems that aren't there
She drove seven hours to check on her mother.
Then she showed up on a Friday support call. Not with a crisis but with a story about a sick parent, a sister who wasn’t showing up, and a very long drive.
That morning, during three hours of releasing, something had moved.
“Both with my sister, and with my mom not being well,” she said. “I found a way to be happy no matter what.”
I thought she was bringing a problem. She was bringing a gain.
But I noticed something else. The way she framed it, this story was still overshadowing her day-to-day life. She was bracing for something to happen, so I asked about that.
“Maybe what we just saw was a little bit of an expectation that there still might be a problem.”
She laughed. “Yeah. That’s present.”
The feeling we worked with wasn’t her family situation directly. It was the expectation that this situation wasn’t over, and that something was still about to go wrong.
It’s like any good horror movie, I said. You can’t end the film until the last big scare.
“And then there’s a sequel,” she said.
So we welcomed that feeling — the not-quite-over-ness of it. And then I asked:
Right here, right now, if the past is just made up and the future is a fantasy — is there a problem?
“My mind says yes.”
What if that is the problem?
She sat with that. Then: “no mind, no problem.”
She didn’t need more releasing. The family situation hadn’t changed. What shifted was simpler: she saw what was actually happening. The mind, doing its job. Still scanning. Still constructing the next act. Not because there was anything there, but because that’s what minds do.
When she stopped arguing with it — allowed it to be exactly what it was, “a pissed-off cat that didn’t get petted,” she said, stalking off — it stopped demanding attention. Not because she fixed it. Because she let it be.
You probably know this feeling. Not the dramatic spiral. The low hum underneath a moment that should feel okay.
The mind that won’t stop scanning is the same mind that showed up when you needed it. It doesn’t know the emergency is over. It’s still on watch.
It doesn’t need to be believed. It doesn’t need to be argued with. It doesn’t need to be released.
It needs to be seen. And when you see it clearly — not as an enemy, but as something that has been working hard on your behalf — the natural response isn’t frustration.
It’s gratitude.
The mind will find a problem if you ask it to. It will find one if you don’t. The question is whether you have to go where it points.