The whole night, I couldn’t sleep. Memories of the past and thoughts about the future kept coming into my mind. Sometimes I simply floated with the waves of thought. At other times, I gave too much power to certain memories, and I could feel the stress building inside me.
Then I tried to return to the present moment. A kind of Zen mindset came over me.
In the deep silence of the night, when everyone else was sleeping, I just lay there. The next two days felt long. I slept a lot and didn’t feel like doing anything.
But there was another problem: when I stayed completely in the present moment, time seemed to move painfully slowly. I would stare at the floor and listen to the constant hum of the split AC. What do you do with yourself in such moments?
If I stayed only in the present, time barely moved. But if I allowed myself to drift into thoughts—positive or negative—time passed quickly. The problem was that wandering too deeply into the past often left me sad, and sometimes even a little angry.
So I began wondering: What is the middle way?
Perhaps the middle way is not to stop thinking, but to become more conscious of which thoughts we choose to give our attention to.
Pick the good memories. Give them some space. Revisit them.
Count your blessings.
I remembered something from the book Chaali Din: why do we keep collecting the thorny memories from our past? Why do we hold on so tightly to the moments that hurt us while allowing the beautiful ones to fade away?
My wandering mind began to calm when I deliberately turned toward beautiful memories.
I started counting my blessings—the things life has given me, the things I have achieved, the people who have valued me, the moments when someone special gave me their time and attention.
Maybe we cannot stop the mind from wandering.
But perhaps we can choose the garden in which we allow it to wander.