Saturday, November 03, 2007

internal dialog.

i took the go-train back from toronto last night after riding against the wind for two and a half hours along the lakeshore into toronto from burlington.


as i was standing with my bike i became aware of a man sitting in front of me who was clearly in some considerable distress.

he was continually dialoging inside over some matter which concluded with him gesturing facially with ironic regret.

this went on for over 20 minutes as i stood there and it was all i could do to just stand and ignore the constant cycling in his mind which finished each time with the rolling of the eyes and shaking of the head and silent tut-tutting.

i wanted to tell the poor chap to break the tape, but how can one begin uninvited.

the person beside him eventually left the train and so i was able to sit beside him and not have to find myself directly looking at him so much, but every now and then i would look over and, sure enough, he was riffing away.

my point here isn`t to focus on this man`s plight so much as to point out that we all get caught in internal dialog that goes round in circles.

the trick is to recoginse the fact that we all do it and to break the cycle.

so how do we do it?

we tell the voice in our head to shut the fuck up.

laughter is good.

now tell the voice to shut the fuck up every time you catch yourself ratting on about something that probably won`t happen anyway, and if it already did there isn`t much we can do about it..........otherwise we`d be busy doing something about it.

if that guy could have told the voice in his head to shut the fuck up enough for it to shut the fuck up, he would have been able to rest on his way home, or wherever he was going.

2 comments:

Ticharu said...

Maybe he was re-hashing his latest victom! Yikes!!!

Dr.Alistair said...

i never thought of that.

i will look for blood under the fingernails next time!