As we grow up, we start to think about ourselves.  We react to our parents' and other adults' expectations of us, and measure our worth against our performance.  We watch people we admire and compare ourselves to them.  The more we start to wonder how we're doing, the more we use our thinking to compare ourselves to others when we feel uncertain or insecure.  Some people brag and "talk a big game."  Some people feel more and more inadequate and either tell others about the things they don't like about themselves, or just fade out of social interactions.  No matter what we think about ourselves, it is just the "reality" we're creating with our own thoughts.  The common attribute we all share is that we have the remarkable gift TO think, and whatever we bring to mind appears real to us.  We are all creating our own unique reality.  There's nothing special about any one thinker.  Every human being lives in the power to create their experience of life.  We enjoy life when we accept the ordinary fact of ever-changing thoughts, and just appreciate our ordinary life as thinkers.

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The sign that we're overthinking is that whatever we're doing starts to feel difficult and we start to feel more confused and urgent.  The more we think, the more we get lost in our thoughts.  Often our life training, or our inclination, is to keep trying harder to figure things out.  But the feeling of confusion or urgency that arises is a warning sign that what we really need is to quiet down, give our thinking a rest, and get a fresh start.  It doesn't require a long time, just a clear mind.  When we're making something too hard, the focus turns personal -- we start thinking we should be able to do this, or we can't afford to fail...  The relief of just stopping, glancing away, slowing down, giving ourselves a minute, brings us back to the moment and opens our minds to fresh, clearer ideas.  A colleague often refers to this as like a deer finding its way through the woods; it will stop often, look around, sniff the air, and stay quiet for a bit until it "sees" where to go next, then set off again.

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We sometimes make relationships and communications more difficult than they need to be through innocent misunderstanding of the state of mind that facilitates good communication.  Common communication problems are not truly listening, which happens when we're thinking about the next point we want to make or taking things personally and thinking about ourselves rather than listening for the point.  To sidestep awkward or difficult communication, we can listen to the other(s) from a quiet mind, without personal thinking or analysis that muddles our listening for the others' point.

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Christine offers the metaphor of life seeming like a high-speed train ride.  We settle down, look out, and take in the view as the train slowly starts to move.  Then we experience the illusion, as the train speeds up, that life is moving past us.  Suddenly, when the train reaches full speed, life is a blur rushing by, and we can barely take it in or enjoy it.  Many of us spend a lot of our time moving and thinking so fast that we are always in a hurry -- doing the best we can to make sense of the blur, and never realizing that it's the vehicle we're riding in, not the life we're passing through, that is too speeded up to appreciate it, or reflect on it, or learn as we go.  We have the power to slow down, to be present and use the feelings of anxiety and pressure to push ourselves, as a sign to ease off, and trust that a quieter mind will "see" life clearly and awaken to wisdom, insight, and inspiration.

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Life, as Sydney Banks described it, is "a contact sport."  In a contact sport, each player has great plays and terrible plays.  Wins and losses.  Injuries they cause and injuries that happen to them.  No one can expect smooth sailing under cloudless skies every minute of every day.  Our life is our learning adventure.  Life offers us the development of new skills, the clarity to learn from mistakes, the humility to recognize that denying our role in ups and down holds us back.  Denial sustains the uneasy experience of insecurity.  When we accept human frailty in all of us, when we don't try to evade or deny or refuse to see our part in the course of events, we are cheating ourselves from learning life's lessons, building trust within ourselves and with others, and finding peace of mind.  Denial keeps us stuck in time; denial keeps us stuck in our own beliefs about ourselves and life.  Stuff happens.  We make mistakes.  We are sometimes thoughtless and hurtful.  We are human beings.  Denial slams the door on our spiritual growth and our capacity to acknowledge and learn from our past, and the ability to take responsibility for our own missteps and then let them go.

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When people are in low moods -- such as anxiety, hopelessness, grief, anger, discouragement -- the immediate response is to figure out what or who is bothering us so we can deal with the perpetrator or circumstance that we think is bringing us down.  That is the trick of our mind explained by the Principles.  We are the source of our thoughts -- but as we experience thoughts coming to life, it looks like things are happening TO us.  As we understand that we are the thinkers creating our experience, we find our natural power to navigate ups and downs and realize our power to change.

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Optimism is looking for the best in people and looking for the beauty in life, and trusting we'll see solutions when faced with challenge.  Hopelessness is insecurity about whether people will accept or like us, seeing risk or danger in life, and focusing on analyzing what is wrong when faced with challenge.  Those opposite states are not the result of life; they are the result of how we are using our thinking to describe life.  Hopelessness and Optimism are both habits of thought that we adopt without intent.  Understanding how we think and generate our own unique experience gives us the opportunity to accept that ups and down are part of life, and the assurance that we can always change.

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Over time, we take on ideas about who we are and how we are.  We start to see them as our personality, our character.  Maybe someone we respect has frequently referred to us as a hard worker.  Maybe a friend has commented favorably on our looks.  Maybe a sibling has called us stupid.  Maybe a counselor has diagnosed us as anxious or depressed.  Whatever "labels" have affected us become the story we believe about ourselves.  Without understanding the way Thought works, we can hold ourselves back -- or exceed beyond our dreams -- depending on how seriously we take our labels and whether we recognize that we can decide what thoughts to take to heart, and we can change our minds.

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We don't always realize that the only source of our feelings and experience about life is our power to think and our thoughts coming to life as our personal reality.  So we often "blame" our experience on what other people say or think, or believe that we need others to say or do things to make us happy.  The Principles explain that our experience is generated from within ourselves.  When we see that we can change our minds and change our experience, we know we do not live at the mercy of life circumstances, but we live from the thinking we do about them.  That is the freedom to make the most of life.

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It's natural for people, groups, nations to have differing ideas, and for them to believe in them.  This only creates conflict, hostility, or anxiety when the people involved become attached to their ideas and take them personally.  That can lead to polarization and hostility, rather than interaction from the understanding that every person's thinking looks real to them.  If one party thinks "A" is the answer and another party thinks "Z" is the answer, the solution arises from understanding the power of thought and respectful exploration of each others' ideas, with an eye to possibly finding common ground or even discovering new ideas. 

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