Personal essays
My third word of 2026.
The wandering mind
I’ve been trying meditation again lately.
Man, do I suck at it.
It turns out, we all suck at it.
Our mind is going to wander. The process of meditation is noticing when your mind wanders and returning to your home base. For many people, the home base is the breath.
What a lot of us do is we notice our mind has wandered and then we berate ourselves for that. So more time is spent away from our breath. Five minutes of this can go by quite quickly. The time you’ve decided to spend meditating can be both short and valuable. Don’t waste it thinking about stuff like this.
I’m writing this essay on a flight to Singapore.
I flew from Cleveland to Chicago and then Chicago to San Francisco.
I was supposed to land in San Francisco at one terminal and then have forty-five minutes to get to the international terminal before the Singapore bound plane stopped boarding.
More than that, I looked at the history of the flight and 30% of the time the Chicago to San Francisco flight was 45 minutes or more late.
I worried about making my connection off and on for a week.
The plane took off from Chicago late after stopping for de-icing.
We landed and the pilot said we were ten minutes early and our gate had changed.
I was the second person off the plane and the flight to Singapore was a three minute walk.
All that time spent worrying about something I couldn’t do anything about.
All that time spent worrying about something that never happened.
Returning
Meditation is like a microcosm of this. We sit and deliberately notice when the mind wanders.
What should we do when it does?
Notice and bring it back.
Your mind will wander. That’s what it does.
You are asking it to do something extraordinary when you sit to meditate.
People use all sorts of words to describe the practice. The one that seems to have stuck is mindfulness.
I think of it as paying attention.
I’ve been listening to meditations led by Joseph Goldstein lately and I’ve noticed a couple of things.
First, he talks about “the body”. Notice the body. Not “your” body. Despite everything I’ve learned about writing, he uses the passive voice and takes “you” out of it.
When I (there I am again) heed his advice, I notice a big difference. Keeping me out of it and just passively noting things keeps me from going down rabbit holes in which I’m essentially imagining stories about me.
The second thing he recommends is to quickly label your diversions and get back to the breath.
When you notice that your mind has wandered and you are getting caught up in your thoughts, have your internal voice whisper the word “Thinking” and return to the breath.
That one word is amazing. There’s no saying to yourself, “I’m so stupid, why can’t I focus, why am I…”. You whisper “Thinking” and it’s like popping that thought. You are free to return to the breath. Literally secods later when your mind wanders again, you notice, you say “Thinking”, and you return.
Sometimes there’s am underlying reason for your wandering. In that case, if it’s obvious, you can give it a name. You can whisper “Feeling sad” or “Feeling anxious” or whatever.
You don’t take time to analyze it. You just notice, speak it’s name, and return to the breath.
Reconcile
My third word this year is “attention” and it’s short for “Pay attention to what you pay attention to.”
Notice when your mind has these thoughts. Maybe I can’t stop myself from worrying about a tight connection but I can notice when I am worrying and say to myself, “Nonproductive worrying” and let it go.
I knew that I could have rebooked so that I was taking an earlier flight so that I’d have longer in San Francisco. When I decided not to do that, I needed to also make the decision that I wouldn’t worry about it.
The point is not that we shouldn’t worry - we’re going to worry. But do something about it or don’t.
We had a neighbor whose toilet broke while they were gone and the water ran out of the toilet on the third floor and caused damage to their whole house.
I worried about that. So when I travel, I turn off the water main to my house. Now I don’t worry about that anymore.
I’ve been keeping a daily log that’s based a bit on the process of selling, scheduling, and running ads on the radio. I’ve wanted to build this app for twenty years.
Maybe I will.
For now, I’m using a variant of something Mike Rohde demonstrated as a variant of the bullet journal.
On the left page he lists the things he hopes to accomplish in several categories. This past week my categories were Dim Sum (things I need to do for my company), Travel (getting ready for this trip), Projects (courses I’m preparing and books I’m writing), and Personal (stuff I do for myself).
On the left page I have a vertical timeline and I rough out when I think I will do some of the big items.
On the left page is my Log. There’s a vertical timeline and I note what I actually did at every moment of the day.
At the end of each week I look back and notice which items tended to get pushed off or not done and which items sort of appeared out of no where and took up time in my day.
This is called reconciling the log where I compare what I planned to what I actually did.
This is where I pay attention to what I pay attention to.
I note it and I return to living my life.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 304. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe