Everyday Canvas

That Wandering Mind!

Prompt: Why does a mind wander from the task at hand? Does your mind wander at times? How do you re-focus?

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Someone is expecting a comment or an answer, but your blank stare has given you away, unless you’ve been quick and clever enough to come up with a halfway passable reply.

“Sorry, my mind was elsewhere.” Don't we all say this often enough!

Whether this mind-wandering occurs too often or not, it is true for most of us. It certainly happened to me, especially when I was much younger, in school or elsewhere, the daydreamer that I was. Whether through fantasy, musing, reflecting, analyzing, or planning, the trajectory of my mind always hopped from one thing to another. Oh, I had defenses in place all right, such as uttering “Ahha!” “Hmm” “You don’t say!” “Really” or nodding and smiling at the person whose words had just passed me by, especially because I discovered the ploy of putting myself in the default mode.

Then during my early thirties, with the onset of the New-Age movement, I happened to come across self-hypnosis and meditation. I think, of the two, meditation helped me more. Concentrating on the breath or a word and learning to accept and forgive my mind’s transgression whenever it took place somehow worked to lessen my mind’s out-of-site flights.

My mind still wanders, to a much lesser degree, but it does so especially when I am in the company of people whose conversation it finds trivial or not too amusing. Still, a bit of wandering is not too bad; on the contrary, it could be useful for us writers. Who knows what kind of bright ideas our buzzing minds will grant us while picking nectar from different concepts?

I am finding nowadays that even when my mind is off on its own journey, a part of it is able to stay and grasp the essence of the conversation, so I am not too bad off. Possibly, if I continued with the meditation practices regularly, I could be in better control. Although I haven’t totally neglected meditating, I don’t do it on a regular basis; I meditate for a few minutes only whenever the fancy strikes me.

Since, through meditation, I could train my mind’s tendency to roam to a degree, I believe building focus is do-able, almost like getting a workout in a gym to build muscles and strength. Then, maybe it is in the nature of the mind to wander, but as long as I keep it under control like a spirited doggy on a leash, I won’t be fined by the other people for letting it loose.