Don’t believe everything you think
It's funny how my memory works. I remember moments, not full-on circumstances. My husband asked me about a line expense from three years ago. I definitely don't remember who I went to Pizza Chicago with in Palo Alto three years ago. I remember the restaurant had moved. I remember it was the only time I went to their new location. But good lord, man. I can't remember a single more detail about that experience.
Do you know what I do remember, though? In rather vivid and exquisite detail? The feeling I had just before, during and after I read a bumper sticker.
The year? The date? Nope. Here's what I remember: it was a gray early morning. I was on my way to the closest grocery store for bread and milk before anyone else in the house woke up. I was feeling overwhelmed with the weight of my own imagined incompetence as a mother, wife, and pet owner. Or maybe it wasn't imagined. Maybe I was, in fact, incompetent at all of those things. More than anything I felt in my body the urge to run away from everything. Maybe to Vermont. I know I love Vermont and I don't know anyone there. It's close enough to people I know and love. It's affordable, not like the Bay Area, and it's beautiful. Never mind the long bitter-cold winters and sweltering short summers. It would be the perfect place to escape to.
And then, at the stop sign at Bay and Hill, the bumper sticker: Don't believe everything you think.
Its own little stop sign.
Something lightened. I didn’t suddenly have answers about my parenting or my marriage or whatever I'd left undone. But for a moment, just a moment, the suffocating weight of what I'd been thinking became a question rather than a verdict. And in that question, I could see other realities. My kids' realities. My partner's. The dog's, probably. The thought I'd been living inside like it was the only reality that existed turned out to simply be a perspective.
And there was something else. Time opened back up. What had felt permanent, sealed, mine forever to carry, revealed itself as a moment. A long uncomfortable moment in my parenting and partnering and being me. But a moment.
I drove home with the bread and milk.
I also drove home with a mantra. A philosophy. The beginning of a practice that has shaped most of what I've done since, including the work I do now.
Think, stop. Think, question. Over and over. Like stop motion animation, the kind from the 70s specials I grew up watching. Each frame a small deliberate choice. Nothing fluid. Nothing automatic. Just the space. The space between the thought and the belief. Between what I feel and what is actually, verifiably, true.
Eight years later, when I returned to college to complete my degree in psychology, I learned the word epistemology. How we come to know what we know and believe. And suddenly that stop motion practice had a name. A lineage. A decade of parking lots and pickup lines, and it turned out philosophers had been at it for centuries.
This life is a process, a practice, and one million opportunities to begin again.
