There is a line in a song by U2 that has been in my head over the last few days. It talks about the idea that some of our thoughts are too expensive for us to ever want to keep. It is an idea that interests me. Do you have expensive thoughts? Do you have thoughts that will cost you too much? I guess I see two significant ideas in this. The first is the idea that we can set ourselves a ‘thought budget’. We can evaluate and set limits around our thinking patterns. This would be a little bit like noticing a red flag waving if we begin to go down a negative thought road - or in into an ‘expensive’ thought area – and at that point making the decision to call our sponsor, call our support person, practise some self-soothing plan – interrupting out thought pattern, not allow ourselves to go window shopping in the kinds of thoughts that will end up costing us more than we can really manage. I see this as being like noticing dark thoughts looming, noticing ourselves spiralling down into despair or just getting sucked into some kind of self-condemning thinking – and saying to ourselves, ‘Hang on, if I keep going there that is going to cost me a lot’. Even if the cost is simply the time that is wasted on negative thinking – but of course there can be a lot of other things lost to negative thinking – in fact whole lives can be lost – and that is way too high a price for anyone to pay. What we need to learn to do is to stay in the thought areas we can afford – the ones that are not going to cost us too much in the end. The healthy ones. The less destructive ones that don’t cost us too much. The ones that don’t break our mental budget. The second element in this is of course the reminder that all of this comes back to choice. We have the capacity to choose which thoughts to welcome and which thoughts to let go. Which thoughts to dwell on and which are going to lead us into troubled waters and would be healthier to not focus on. We so often forget that we have this choice. Just because we have a thought doesn’t mean we must keep thinking it. Sometimes random thoughts pop into my head and I know I can water them and watch them grow or I can assess them for validity and then dispense with them if they are just negative and destructive. We are never compelled simply by our thoughts. Just because we have them doesn’t mean we must keep them. Some are simply too expensive and we need to learn to let them go before they cost us too much. Today my posts and sharing is all about thoughts and particularly the idea that we can chose what we think and what we let go of. If this is an area you struggle with then I hope that there will be some encouragement here, something that will help you in this area that for many of us is a battle, something that helps you maintain a better balance in your own thought account. Love and hugs ~ Sue
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 22:15:00 +0000
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