My So-Called Superpower

I used to believe that the fact that my mind was in constant motion was a superpower.  Thinking about problems at work while mowing and trimming my near perfect lawn helped me “see around corners” and anticipate problems and dangers.  I would put my anxious mind at ease by devising solutions and crafting conversations that  would get me out of any bind I was in.

I can see now that that superpower was really a sickness.  A cancer of control that was poisoning professional relationships on multiple fronts.  My superpower allowed me to bend facts with words that planted seeds of ideas I could sow when it suited me.  And while that worked at times, the end result was relationships where trust was in short supply or about to be in short supply.  I was, unawaredly, gaslighting those around me.

The cancer metastasized in other ways, too.  One was the simple fact that a mind that cannot be calmed and quieted has an impenetrable barrier to self-awareness.  Only in the quiet of intentionally not thinking can we truly see ourselves and understand how temporal our thoughts are and that we are not what we think or feel.  I was one who overidentified with whatever I was thinking or feeling in the moment.  Happy, sad, competent, a failure: these were not simply feelings or thoughts, they were who I was and how I presented to the world.  So on any given day I might be owned by happiness and bring joy to the office.  Or I might be owned by frustration and bring disruption.  It has taken me all these years to understand just how insubstantial my thoughts are and yet how substantial I am in the eyes of God.  And what a difference that brings to how I present to the world.

The Buddhists have a concept of “not self”, the idea that all of the ways we identify ourselves as unique and separate beings from the world as a whole are an illusion.  That when we spend time examining our thoughts and the emotions they cause, there is no controlling “I” at the  center creating those thoughts.  They are like the weather.  They come and they go, conditions change and then they change again.  Perhaps this is what Jesus was describing in Matthew 10:39—That it is only in losing oneself that we can find ourselves.

And the last metastasis of my cancer is the cost to my relationships personally.  A mind in constant thought does not listen, is not present and life happens in the now.   Only now.  And only with a quiet mind can one hear what those they love need.  My busy mind robs thos I love of my presence to their pain, their joys, their sorrows and their struggles.  I want to be as Jesus was:

Open

Available

Inviting