Thought traffic

 

This week, my mind has been on a kind of accidental world tour.

One moment, I’m watching political debates unfold and finding myself amused by the intensity. People defend their views like heirlooms, even when those views wobble under the slightest pressure. There’s something oddly human about it. The need to be right. The need to belong to an idea.

Then, without warning, my attention softens. A single flower pushes through cracked ground, blooming in the middle of climate anxiety and environmental chaos. It feels almost rebellious. Fragile, yet determined. And suddenly I’m emotional over something that doesn’t need words to make its point.

My thoughts keep swinging. Empathy gives way to anxiety. Curiosity drifts into prayer. I think about parenthood. The quiet pride when your child does something small but astonishing. The way a simple moment can rearrange your heart. But alongside that joy lives the weight. The sleepless nights. The constant low-grade fear. The sacrifices no one applauds. All so this tiny human might someday leave a meaningful fingerprint on this fast-spinning planet.

What I’ve realized is this: the thoughts themselves are not the problem. They arrive from everywhere. Headlines. Half-heard conversations. A joke that lands deeper than expected. A memory that wasn’t invited. And that’s normal. Thoughts are travelers. They were never meant to ask permission.

For a long time, I treated them like enemies. If I avoided a thought, it chased me. If I denied it, it settled in like an unpaying tenant. And if I clung too tightly, it hurt when it inevitably tried to leave.

So this week, I experimented with something simpler, though not easier. I watched. I let the thoughts perform. I let the emotions take the stage, say their lines, feel important for a moment, and then bow out. No interrogation. No judgment. No panic. Just presence.

And somewhere in that watching, the noise softened. Not because life suddenly made sense, but because I stopped wrestling with it.