DESOLATION / LUST

Pay attention to things that you’d normally not be drawn to. Does any of it interest you?

If something does, concentrate on it. Just look at it. Where did it come from? Why is it there? Do you like it? What do your thoughts guide you to do? Consider doing it.

The way that your mind works means certain things, which might otherwise hold great significance for you, may remain if not invisible then as if they are not worth a second glance.

Think of Horatio Nelson peering into his telescope and announcing “I see no ships.“  His decision to ignore the approaching ships that he could in fact see was a strategic one. Your mind operates strategically, too, adding or subtracting significance to the way your recognise objects out in the world, to thoughts, to feelings, to dreams. Repression, dissociation: there are a various ways of clinically describing why this happens and what goes on inside you while you do it.

Sometimes you may do it only at certain times: when you are stressed, for example. Your focus changes according to your mental state, which shifts in line with whatever your body is doing to try and make everything in an ongoing experience add up and leave you okay. The problem is that ‘an ongoing experience’ will include many thoughts and feelings about events from the past that suggest how what’s happening presently may end. It doesn’t take much to make what you are trying to do now become an attempt to copy whatever your mind tells you would have been the right thing to do then, on a previous occasion.

That’s all very complicated. Simply focusing on what may normally escape your attention can give you a vital new perspective on life. You may start to see the world more fully, less telescoped, and including things, which, once upon a time might have been best avoided.

You may start to understand the special place in your life that something might have which could in the past have been too painful to include. And even if it’s simply a sock given to you by someone who loved you, I hope that you start to understand how lovable you really are.