Spacious Thought
Anxiety. Anxiety is a projection away from the present moment into the future — near futures, far futures, imagined futures. It’s the mind spinning its wheels in possibilities that have not occurred, and in most cases will not occur. It’s those topics that stoke our worries and fears.
Recently I was spinning my mental wheels, anxious of another conceivable and troubling circumstance. This wasn’t a new topic, but a fear that my thoughts often turn to. It isn’t important what that topic is — it’s one of those persistent, runaway thoughts that we wish we could move on from. As I wondered again how I could move my thoughts away from that anxious topic, a simple analogy occurred to me: thought takes up space.
Thought, it generally seems, is an insubstantial thing, drifting in, moving from one to the next. In common language we don’t have a good way to concretize thought. Perhaps it’s simple, though — it may be that “thought” can be conceived as something that takes up space. After all, we would naturally say that thought takes time. Modern physics relates time to space, saying they are one in the same. This analogy, that thought is spacious, may be useful as a tool to prune unwanted thoughts from our mental landscape. If thoughts take up space, then one way to end unwanted thought is to slowly replace it with something else in that same space.
Imagine then that your mind is a vast garden landscape. The plant life within this garden are your varying thoughts: wanted, unwanted, controlled, uncontrolled, graceful, spontaneous. If we desire new, constructive, desirable thoughts, then they must be cultivated in the garden to replace the old, fearful, undesired thoughts. Just as unwanted weeds must be cultivated out of a garden to make space for new flowers or desired plant life, so must undesired thoughts be cultivated away to make space for the desired thoughts. We must decide what those new thoughts will be, just as we must decide what to plant in the garden.
This gardening is not effortless. It is an activity that requires our intention, attention, and energy. As previously germinated weeds may continue to sprout and show their face in the garden, so may old thoughts continue to sprout. Over time, those old weed-like thoughts will sprout less and less, as the space previously occupied by them is now occupied by stronger, newer thoughts. As the new thoughts extend and deepen their roots, less space will be available for the weeds to grow.
Mindfulness and meditation might be thought of as an intentionally and actively sparse garden. Instead of filling up all available space with new thoughts, we could cultivate an economy of thought as another approach to mental gardening. There is a saying that “nature abhors a vacuum”, and it would seem that in this case it might be initially more difficult to create a sparse garden — that it would be easier to cultivate new thoughts to replace old thoughts, rather than outright removing the old thoughts. Perhaps a sparse garden is something to strive for, though, as it ultimately may lend greater leeway to the overall design of the mental landscape — a skilled mental gardener that may choose to have plant life in a particular area, or nothing at all. A sparse garden with ground readily available for new paradigms, creativity, and seeds of insight to take root.
