Overthinking

I wanted to write about opportunity. How the wrong opportunity that presents itself in a time of need can actually motivate you to decide upon and pursue something better.

I got caught up in how self-indulgent it felt. How borderline pathological the examined life can become. How philosophy and philosophizing won't dig you out of a hole. Sometimes you just need a ladder or a shovel and a lot of hard work.

'Imagine, if you will, that we are not in fact in a hole…' You know how it goes - nowhere. And thus indecisiveness, and all the excuses for non-action, while sometimes seductive, often painful, and usually circular and unproductive, don't actually move you all that far from your starting position.

Though I suppose it is practice. Running around in a circle long enough, spending years lost in the same maze, may eventually lead you to conclude, 'Hey, why don't I just step over this knee high wall, there's clearly no other way out of this?'

And this is what I've always loved and feared about empty dharmas. Questions that actually don't need answering, yet can hold you sirenlike in their sway. 'What should I do?' 'Who should I be?' - whose only real answers lie in doing and being. Do something, be something - you can, at least for some short span, do or be something else.

It's congenital - I know - my sister has it in almost the exact same words. If you don't have it it looks like insanity - and if you have it bad it is insanity. It's overthinking. Or thinking a lot - which, with enough practice and sedatives you hope one day can be tamed into just thinking deeply, or enough, but sure beats the alternative, which is thinking not at all.