Think

“If I had seen nothing else, in my whole life –only the moose dancing- I would have been happier”

    John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

           

Do I think too much?  Do you?  Sometimes I feel I can’t turn it off.  My mind jumps form subject to subject like a TV with a button on the remote stuck.  I also mull over things I can’t do anything about.  Often before a meeting I’ll play out the entire conversation in my head before I get there.  I’ve also redone conversations and meetings from my past, sort of “correcting” them until I’m satisfied with the new outcome.  Which rarely happens.  Is this how those guys walking down the street having conversations with themselves got started?

Sometimes I’ll be running my response choices through my head in the middle of a conversation and actually miss a lot of what the other person is saying.  I think this makes me seem disinterested and aloof when I’d like to be anything but.  Imagine how that played out for me during job interviews.  Interviewer: Mr. Wright why do you want to work here and Consolidated Widgets?  Me: And you are?

Years and years and years ago a friend told me I was a very negative person.  She went on to explain that she had enough negativity in her life so that was that.  Did she think I was being negative when actually I was strategizing on how best to respond to something she said?  Did I over think that relationship before it was ever a relationship, thereby ruining it?

It’s hard to be happy when I’m always virtually fixing things.  It’s insanity to try and fix the past, whether it’s a job I didn’t take or a turn I didn’t make.  Can’t be done.  I think that’s why time machines will never been invented; if we had a manner in which to go back and fix what went wrong in our pasts, we’d never stop.  We’d tweak and tweak until the end of time in a universe where time for us would never end.  Kind of like that Greek guy who perpetually pushes that boulder up that hill.  What was his name, Sissy Puss?  (I looked it up, it was Sysiphus.  He's pictured above).

I read the above quote from John Irving a few times before I moved on in the book.  I recognized it as a major point in the story and wanted to make sure I got it.  The character who says this, says it when he is very old, after he is reviewing mistakes including considering himself a failure in the main mission he’d assigned himself in his life; the protection of a friend.  When all was said and done, he found himself basically unhappy.

I don’t know if my racing mind has made me unhappy.  I find happiness every day, little laughs that help me move from one moment to the next.  Sometimes larger ones.  I’m I generally happy?  When all the happy moments are weighed against the unhappy ones at the end of my life, which will come out on top?  Well, that’s too much to think about.