Do This
I have a task. My new bird feeder uses high quality food. Peanuts and sunflower seeds. All ground into little pieces. The birds love it. But so too do other varmints. Usually, I take it in at night because If I leave the feeder hanging overnight, the food gets eaten. Last night I got home late, left the feeder hanging, this morning it was empty. I’m going to put up a camera and see if I can find the culprit. I’d like to see how they’re doing it. Night before last I found a fox in the sumacs where the feeder hangs. That would be interesting.
I do a pretty fair job of imagining things, a trait that has ruined a number of relationships over the years, but can also stand me in good stead when applied to things like, how did the fox get the food? That’s a fun thing to think about, a lot better than wondering why someone did something and coming up with all sorts of disturbing answers that bear little relationship to reality. I’ve gotten better over the years at simply taking things at face value, but there’s always a part of me that wants to know why and will go right ahead and make up answers.
At some point I think it might be fun to visit a counselor and see if they can spot the cause of my predilection for narrative building. Or I could just read up on it and see if that tells me anything. I think it would be helpful. Right now, my main protection is to avoid acting on any of the goofy things I think, although that’s harder than it sounds. Way harder. Because retraining a mind appears to be a never ending business. The mind, or at least mine, once it learns to do something, appears perfectly ready to do it over and over, even if it is ultimately destructive. Although perhaps wondering how the fox got the food is my mind’s way of redirecting me, saying, “this is how wondering why is supposed to work.”