The Brain Shelf

When talking with a friend the other day, he kept getting back to an issue where he had really messed up on years ago.  It seemed as if he just couldn't let it go...just kept on wanting to massage it.   What seemed to bother him the most was not the issue itself.  He intellectually knew it was in the past and that there was nothing that could change what had been done.  What was really eating him up was the fact that the issue periodically just kept jumping out at him, sometimes, it seemed, as if out of nowhere.

I think we all have stuff like that going on in our heads.  It's junk, not unlike space junk that just floats around and comes to roost at inopportune times....to mess with us (or so it seems).  I know I have plenty of it in there, and the bulk of it is about some broken relationships of my past, the bad decisions I made when living in the dark, etc, etc. 

I think when we come to believe it almost seems easier to "see" that old junk in the head.  It almost seems as if it purposely lands in our thought center to tease us or haunt us....or worse, to drive a wedge into our spiritual security...that which we continue to work on.  And at times it is so strong that I could almost swear that there is a demon in my head that is waving the red flag at the bull.

Here is what I shared with my friend during that conversation.  It was something that took me a long time to be able to learn and use.  I compartmentalize.  Say what?  I've come to accept the fact that there is space junk in my mind.  It is as much a part of me as my skin and my DNA.  Because of that, it is there and it isn't going to go away.  It will go to the grave with me.  So I have mentally constructed a couple of rooms in my brain.  There is a room for good junk, and there is a room for bad junk.  And in each room I have stored the junk in boxes and placed them on shelves that I constructed in each room. 

Now I just accept the fact that every once in a while one of those boxes of junk is going to fall off the shelf, open up, and start to float around my head.  When that happens, I have three choices:

1. I can ignore the junk that is floating around
1. except that just causes clutter that I might be ignoring but know is there
2. I can do what my friend was doing...fretting and getting upset about it
1. Let's face it...we have enough stuff going on in our lives that we don't need that kind of distraction.
3. I can put the junk back in the box, put the box back on the shelf, and slam the door of that closet shut.

The important thing about the brain shelf is that every once in a while it is going to happen....a box is going to fall off and some junk will float around.  As long as one realizes that, it becomes easier to put the box back on the brain shelf.