Like Otters, Slippery From The Water

On the drive into work this morning I thought about the difficulties of staying inside the moment. According to Google, that fountain of semi-infinite knowledge, I live 11 miles from the office. On an average day, using Lawrence Expressway, it's about a 20 minute commute. You would think that pulling yourself into the moment and staying relatively focused for twenty minutes, while engaged in the fairly complex mechanical task of driving, would be fairly simple. But, as I drove up the expressway, I repeatedly watched my thoughts simply take off.

I would be driving down the road and suddenly solid thoughts would turn fluid and flow across the landscape of my imagination. I came to the conclusion tha t thoughts

were slippery things. Just when you think you have them in your grasp, they will suddenly twist and turn and get away from you. By consciously observing my thoughts I became aware of them as they escaped the present moment.

When I saw the thought had dashed away, I would simply say "Gone!", then try and consider the thought and see what insight I could gain. I would try to find that point where I lost them, where they left the moment. I would look at why they left the moment. I would look at what took them down the path that led them to wherever they were going. I would let the thoughts that escaped go and I would pull back into the current moment.

In that twenty minute drive it would not be an exaggeration to say that those slippery thoughts of mine took off in different directions at least twenty times. They did it in some pretty amusing ways. I would have a trigger thought, somewhere in the present moment, and it would unleash an entire cascade of thoughts that went flowing out of the moment. Sometimes they were slow and subtle, a quiet stream meandering through a mountain meadow. Other times they were a sudden raging torrent that went tumbling over the rocks, all wild coursing and dancing spray. Like otters, slippery from the water, they would pause and then with a flash, be gone.

The moment, this moment, is a challenging place to stay in, even though it is the place where we naturally reside. Our restless imaginations are filled with slippery moments that pause and are gone.