Over the weekend I was glancing through some zen related articles and books at Barnes & Noble and the chapter heading in one of the books was "An Arrow to the Eye". It was basically about how we are blinded by concentrating on the wounds we've suffered, whatever they were. I thought about that today as I moved through the morning.
My monkey mind can run away on the drive to work. It is that place where I start to transition from my personal life to my work life and I start to run through the various things at work that irritate me, that confound me, that anger me and hurt me. It is a list, a litany, a chant of disappointment - and there is really no reason I should focus on it. I essentially like the content of my work, I like most of my co-workers, I enjoy my job most of the time - but during that morning drive, I have a hard time focusing on that good things about it.
During that morning drive my mind focuses on the arrow to the eye. Today, it took me about two hours to get over it, to get past it, to get around it and to let it go. I found the mental exercise of removing the arrow from my eye helped me move past it, though that is no gaurantee that I will stay past it. Each day seems to be a struggle in that regard. Sometimes it feels like every day I get him by a new arrow, a new small indignity, a new something that just irritates me. Now, in the course of the day, where a hunred things happen, I am really talking about only a handful of things - two or three, each day, but for reasons known primarily to itself, those are the moments, those are the things that I end up focusing on, and then they drag me into that place where my monkey mind is going wild.
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