“Your only goal is to be yourself”.

Think about what that means. The simplest of truths are often the most difficult to live.

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,
Round and round, round and round,
The wheels on the bus go round and round,
All day long.”

- Popular nursery rhyme.

Just like the wheels on the bus, our minds go round and round. A thought arises, we attach to that thought, and it becomes a train of thought. Notice the use of modes of transport - the mind is always trying to get somewhere.

We do not need to be slaves to this “getting somewhere, doing something” mentality. Instead we can detach from thought, let those thoughts flow down the river into the distance.

I have a road behind my garden, and from my window I can see the cars go by. In the dark I like to use it as a contemplation - the lights appear, then the car, then the car is gone, then the lights are gone. Like these cars, our thoughts come and go.

Imagine you are crossing a road. When the road is busy, it can be hard to get across. Many cars speed by, some lorries and some motorbikes, bigger thoughts and smaller thoughts, and the busier the road the more anxious we become. When the road is quiet, with only a few cars, a few thoughts, it is relatively peaceful and easy to get across. So, the answer looks to be simple - let’s have a quieter road.

The problem we face is that we cannot control our thoughts, not in the strictest sense of the word. We cannot force our minds into quiet and peace, we cannot stop thoughts by force. Thoughts quieten down naturally when we no longer get attached to them, we can see a thought and drop it, let it go, because we know we are more than just our thoughts. But, our peace is not dependent on how busy or quiet our road is. The more attention we pay to our thoughts, the more we see them and let them go, the slower the traffic goes. This is key. If a busy road has traffic that slows, or even comes to a halt, it is easy to cross. And once it is slow enough that we can cross easily and peacefully, what does it matter if there are cars there or not?

Finding the time to fit in the things you want or think you should do can seem like a very difficult task at times. Often we have something we don’t really want to do but feel we should for whatever reason, and as long as we avoid it we also tend not to get much else done - because our thoughts constantly come back to the thing we are avoiding, creating stress and a general lack of attention on whatever we are doing.

The answer then may be that we just need to get on with the thing we’re putting off. Imagine a flow of water with a block in the way. If we remove this block, then the water can flow, and so too can we flow back into the constant tasks that we have, the constant moments of living. In a sense, when we resist doing the one thing, we stop the flow that allows us to do all the other things. You may have heard a famous phrase from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1, which says:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

If the time for doing the task we resist is now, and we avoid it, then logically that puts everything else out of the right time as well. The correct timing for our tasks is actually interdependent on other tasks and actions or non-actions. To bring in more knowledge (if our task is studying, say), we may need to empty our minds first to allow the space for that new knowledge. If some heavy manual labour is required of us we may need to rest and eat well to fuel our bodies beforehand. So it turns out that clearing that clutter may literally free up your attention so that you can focus on other things! You can get more done by doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done, aligning with the natural rhythms of nature and the flow of life instead of resisting.

What this amounts to of course, is an amount of faith. It means giving up our own egotistical ideas of what to do and when we act, it means giving up our strong preferences and desires in favour of a higher purpose and a higher vision of correct action, timing and living. My advice to you would be not to underestimate the effect doing a small task you’ve been putting off may have on the rest of your day and output and activity and life, things are a lot more interdependent than you think.