Don’t Blame the Mind. It’s Where Your Life Actually Happens.
Thinking Is Not the Enemy. Thinking Is the Terrain.
I read a piece recently that argued thinking is an addiction. That if we could only unhook from thought and drop into our bodies, we’d finally be free.
It’s not a new idea.
and others have drawn attention to our culture’s overreliance on the left brain—logic, planning, language, control. That piece echoed that thread: "None of this micro-managing is actually required. Just stop thinking. Come home to your body. That’s where life happens." I’ve written about ‘The End of Certainty’.I understand the appeal. I know the spin of a mind overworking itself into exhaustion (how do you think any of us understand this, our minds think about thinking?) I’ve felt the cost of the mind looping that seems to tighten rather than resolve. I’ve stood in front of the humming fridge and let the cool air remind me I exist.
But here’s where I part ways with the argument:
It treats thought as the problem.
As something to escape. To silence.
As if meaning-making were a flaw.
But our life doesn’t just happen in the room.
It happens in how we make sense of the room.
Every moment, your brain isn’t just recording reality—it’s narrating it.
Even when you think you’re present, you’re still telling a story about what presence is.
Even in stillness, there’s a quiet narrator saying, “See? You’re here now.” It’s not thought we need to banish—it’s the loop that hasn’t made sense yet we need to understand.
Thought Isn’t Addiction. It’s a Search for Meaning.
The mind doesn’t spin for no reason.
It loops because something hasn’t clicked into place yet.
That’s not dysfunction. That’s design.
We are coherence-seeking creatures. And when something doesn’t sit right—when an experience hasn’t found its place in the larger story of who we are, what we think the world is —the mind keeps circling back. Trying again. Retelling. Reframing. Replaying.
This isn’t failure.
This is you trying to heal.
But “We’d Finally Be Free.”
Free from what, exactly?
From the discomfort of knowing our own minds?
From the intimacy of sitting with our stories, unfinished and raw?
From the responsibility of witnessing our inner terrain with honesty?
When people speak of being “free from thought,” I sometimes wonder—
Is it freedom they want, or just to hit pause from complexity?
Because presence without reflection is just sensation.
And silence without story is just absence.
There’s a kind of modern bypassing that romanticizes stillness but resists integration. As if thought is the intruder, instead of the interpreter. As if our capacity to reflect were somehow a liability instead of a gift.
But the mind isn’t in the way.
It is the way.
The path through confusion isn’t to unhook and drift.
It’s to listen for the thread that makes your experience make sense.
To hold the story long enough for it to settle.
And then—to choose what comes next.
Mystery Is a Story Too.
It may be a left-brained world, but inside our mind there’s no Sophie’s choice.
Mystery and meaning are one mind.
Mystery and meaning are not two sides of a war between hemispheres.
They are co-authors.
One brings wonder.
The other brings language.
Both are part of how we navigate life as conscious, storied beings.
Even the act of surrendering to mystery is itself a narrative.
A shape we give to the unknown.
A way we hold what we don’t yet understand.
The moment we say, “let it stay mysterious,” we’re already building a container for it—we’re storifying it.
So no, I don’t believe we need to escape the mind to come home to ourselves.
We need to understand the story we’re in—and where it’s trying to go next.
Your Life Is a Story. And You Get to Be Its Author.
It’s tempting to chase presence as the holy grail.
To believe that if we could just stop narrating, we’d finally arrive.
But what if we reframed it?
What if we said:
You’re not overthinking. You’re overlooping.
And that looping is just your brain’s way of searching for a version of the story that feels true enough to move forward with.
This morning, I went to my favorite café, the one I go to most days. The waitress who served me looked tired, and said, “Didn’t sleep much. It's too hot, and my mind’s just too busy.”
She didn’t say it with drama, just a kind of weary resignation—like her mind was an uninvited guest she had to endure.
And I wished I could have reached out to her from my time served, and tell her what I see when I look; “That busy mind is the same mind that dreams of the language academy you once told me you want to build.
”That’s not a flaw. That’s Narrative Intelligence at work.”
She doesn’t need to silence it.
She can learn how to listen for the story that’s trying to come through.
We don’t suffer because we think—we suffer because the story we’re thinking hasn’t made sense yet. That’s not addiction. That’s search.
Noticing the loop isn’t the end of the journey—it’s the beginning.
From there, you can shift the story. You can choose your interpretation.
You can stop fighting your thoughts and start writing your way through them.
That’s what I call Narrative Agency.
And it’s one of the most powerful forms of clarity we have.
If this speaks to you…
You’ll love my framework: Open Loop Mastery—a new way to understand mental fatigue, emotional overload, and resistance through the lens of unresolved stories, by developing the Narrative Intelligence that turns loops into clarity.
Because your mind is not broken.
It’s just looking for a story that fits
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