Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains. With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise. Buddhists call it our monkey-mind.
In any given hour we’re besieged by hundreds of thoughts. Most of these thoughts are the same thoughts we had the hour before. And, the hour before that. The same thoughts over and over — for hours, days, weeks, and even years. Sometimes they just come on their own. Sometimes, we coax the more compelling of the bunch so we can poke and prod them over and over.
The more we think something, the more likely we’ll think it again. That’s a neurological fact. To the brain, thought is an action. To think a thought, then to think it over and over, we strengthen that circuitry. Fire it up, baby! Soon, it’ll glow at the slightest provocation. And if fear attaches and catches hold, instinctively we’ll fix to it. Feed it. Nourish it. Hold onto it and watch it grow.
Fear is one of those feelings that’s in love with itself. It will take the slightest sign of trouble to justify and amplify it’s own existence. And, if that sign isn’t there? It will make it up. It scans the world, our imagination, our memories for it’s reason to be, because…well…that’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s a feature, not a bug. Why? When it comes to survival, it’s better to be wary, wrong, and live, than to take your time to be accurate and end up as somebody else’s meal.
Genetically speaking, physical survival is king. Yet, our psychological lives are tied to this very same survival system. These days, most of us can go a lifetime without ever having to run for our lives. Instead, we have deadlines. Mortgages. Car breakdowns. Hundreds of unanswered e-mails marked “urgent”. Our freedom from physical danger allows us the privilege to exercise our threat response on bosses, co-workers, lovers, kids, husbands, and wives.
We’re free now to imagine all kinds of threatening possibilities to stir up that monkey cage. Even better, let’s put that threat sometime in the future when there’s nothing we can do about it. Watch our monkey-mind agitate. Imagine that fear coming to get you sometime next week — the body will react as if it’s right in front of your face!
And if we forget that we were afraid? Oh right! Let me get back to that! We’ll conjure it back. We’ll encourage our own obsessiveness over our envies, our grievances, our jealousies, our losses. We’ll do it in future time where they haven’t yet happened. It will happen. It will…it will…it will. Now, we can sit bracing ourselves while tied to our helplessness. We’ll sit. Wait. Stew within the electro-chemical buzz. We’ll find meaning in all that brain noise.
Shhh…listen…there are messages in that static.
How we love to rattle our own cage only so we can watch our monkey-thoughts scream, hop about, and agitate.
“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on.” Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway
We all have a beast within, a bull to kill…whether it be a habit, a troublesome attachment, a pattern of thought, a sorrow, an addiction, a mood, a fixation, a fear, or something that brings us to rage.
Know that bull. Study where it’s taken its place of refuge. That place in your life where it burrows in. It could be in a bottle of scotch. It could be a room in the house, a chair, your garage, or even in front of your TV or computer screen.
“…in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.“
It could be a state of mind, or that way in which you address your lover, kids, husband, or wife. It could be a place in your imagination where you return again and again to relive a conversation, an encounter, or a past or future dread. It could be a thought, or a cherished belief.
“The bull may take up his querencia in a place where a horse has been killed in a previous fight, where he smells the blood; a place where he has tossed a bullfighter, or any part of the ring for no apparent reason at all; simply because he feels at home there.”
In that place, your bull will be confident, brave, and secure. When you, or anyone else, attempts to challenge it there, you may feel its stubborn refusal in your brooding, or snapping, or numbing, or anger, depression, anxiety, or irritation. The bull has lifted its horns for the goring. Pity the poor loved one who tries to step toward it there.
Like a great matador, we need bring the beast out from it’s place of safety. After a long day’s work, refuse to let it establish its place in your ring. Risk making it uncomfortable.
“The bull must be brought out; but he is gone completely on the defensive and will not respond to the cape and will cut at them with his horns, refusing altogether to charge.”
Step away from that computer. Change your tone of voice. Refuse to spend the night brooding in that chair. Reach for that novel you’ve wanted to read, instead of the TV remote. Pull out that bike, camera or drawing pad, instead of cracking open that beer, marijuana, or bottle of Xanax. Kiss your partner, instead of barking out that complaint. (Or stamp your feet and yell, instead of that half-hearted kiss, if that’s where the bull chooses to live.) Go to that movie by yourself, instead of waiting by the phone. Cook that delicious meal, instead of another night of pizza or take-out chinese.
That pint of ice cream you seem ever destined to eat? Look it square in the eyes, then show it your cape. Weekends get you down? Drink too much? Take a canoe trip, instead of burrowing in and letting that bull raise its surly horns through your boredom, or list of domestic chores.
“…a bull who knows how to use his horns and who cannot be made to leave his querencia is as dangerous for the man to come within range of as a rattlesnake….”
Be brave. Be clever. Change it up. Break routine. Coax it out. If just for an afternoon, flash your cape, and by surprise, slay the fear that owns you. Olé!
A letter makes it personal. It reaches us like a whisper. We may steal off to some private corner to unseal the envelope, if only to better reflect on the words without distraction. We go off to that corner because we can. A letter can be carried anywhere. We can secret it between the pages of a book, or in a pocket, or in your bosom beneath your blouse.
To sit down and compose a letter means taking your time, distilling your intent. There’s paper to choose. The right pen. The envelope. The stamp. In days of old we’d seal our letters closed with wax.
La Lecture de la Lettre, Picasso
When writing the letter, the words must fall carefully to avoid starting over again. Of course, we can leave in the scratch-out, the fingerprint, the smudge, the spill of coffee. To the spouse, lover, or dear friend the misfortune is not a stain, but your actual presence on the page. Leave it, you create a deeper intimacy.
Letters can be heart-filled, or poisoned. A letter can be sensual, tearful, raging, philosophical, mundane. A letter has a weight and texture that we can know through our hands. It can carry a lock of hair, or the trace of perfume.
Napolean scolded his Josephene, “You never write to me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters give him yet you cannot even manage to write him half a dozen lines, dashed off in a moment! What then do you do all day, Madame? What business is so vital that it robs you of the time to write to your faithful lover?”
One way or another, a letter begs the writer’s attention and time.
A letter is handled. Held. Touched. Read. Reread. Folded. The envelope is licked and addressed. The stamp is carefully, or carelessly, secured in its corner. One way or another, you are worth the time and the 42 or some odd cents.
Ask the soldier on the front what it is to receive a letter. If it’s from a wife or lover, he might hold it to his nose hoping to catch her scent. He might kiss it. Lick the envelope’s glue as if seizing the taste of her lips from afar.
Captain Joseph Bush wrote to his wife from Vietnam, “If my mail means as much to you as yours does to me then I know how you feel when the mailbox is empty. Whether or not I get a letter determines if it’s a good day or not.” (1)
A letter holds the other’s presence. It demands thought. Reflection. A sense that the distance between us matters.
“ooooh, my baby she wrote me a letter…”, that soulful Joe Cocker
I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
I will put him together again
with the patience of a chess player.
On October 3, 1974 Anne Sexton was unable to pry out the broken pieces. She closed up the garage, turned the ignition key, and waited for the waft of carbon monoxide exhaust to carry her off toward that “pint-sized journey” into death.
Anne Sexton
Was Anne Sexton’s suicide an inevitable result of parental hostility, or a child’s life gone astray? Was it alcoholism, bipolar disorder, her genes, or caused by some chemical imbalance that might have been corrected if Prozac, or Wellbutrin, or the right combination of Lamictal and Abilify were available then?
We like certainty. We like tidy explanations. We prefer our answers to “why” wrapped in simple, easy-to-organize, packages. “It’s in your brain” makes as much sense as finding causation in child-rearing, toilet training, or that kid who bullied you in 5th grade. A chemical imbalance? It’s enough to make us feel comfortable taking the pill because at least, now, we have a digestible explanation for “why.” We’ll call it a useful little lie.
When it comes to “whys” of human emotional sufferings, the truth is as elusive as it is messy. In the world of psychiatry, causation is a chimera. (1)
psychotic chimera
If there’s anything that modern neuroscience says for certain about the human brain, it’s to keep our humility. One human brain has over 100 billion neurons, 109 trillion synapses, and hundreds of thousands of interconnecting circuits. There are no biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs to distinguish Anne Sexton’s brain, from that of the Dalai Lama, or your neighbor next door who washes his car every weekend and obsesses over his front lawn. Yes, we’ve learned much in the last 10 or so years. But even then, we’ve not scratched the surface of understanding the workings of this magnificent, and at times troubling, organ.
“In a dot of brain no larger than a single grain of sand, 100,000 neurons go about their work at a billion synapses.” Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind
Drug companies have marketed the idea that depression represents a chemical imbalance — a decreased availability in the brain of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Before you jump on the wagon and proclaim your own chemical imbalance, however, consider that there are no tests to date that assess the chemical status of a living person’s brain. There are at least fifteen different serotonin receptors. We have little idea what these receptors actually do, or how they may relate to any psychological state. In fact, it is now estimated that there may be over 100 neurotransmitters, and most psychotherapeutic drugs affect many more neurotransmitters than were initially suspected.
As for genes? Every day we read some article about scientists uncovering a gene that causes shyness, or depression, or fearfulness, or talkativeness, or sexual promiscuity. One gene, one behavior. But, genes do not produce either behaviors or mental states. Genes carry instructions for producing amino acids and proteins, and then assembling these proteins into enzymes and anatomical structures.
Yes, somewhere down the line these structures, whether they be neurons, brain circuits, or the number, kinds, and functioning of synapses, are faintly related to what we do and how we feel. It’s never just one gene acting alone, however, but in concert with other genes. Even our genes have to be switched on or off by a chemical reaction caused by a specific environmental influences — like being spanked, or falling in love, or getting divorced, or reading the Brothers Karamazov, or taking LSD. How this all works to cause anxiety, depression or schizophrenia, we have only the faintest of clues.
Elliot Valenstein, in his book Blaming the Brain, reminds that there is no way that a mere one hundred thousand genes can determine the precise configuration of 10 trillion synapses in the human brain. Genes may build the structure of the house, but it’s our collection of experiences that furnish it, decorate the walls, landscape the yard, create the mood, whether chaotic, calm, or melancholic – in essence, make a life our home. (2)
Does it mean we should shun the help offered, whether it be talk therapy, pharmaceuticals, or some combination thereof? Of course not. Ask the tens of thousands who have been be mercifully spared the fate of the worlds’ Anne Sextons. Poet Jane Kenyon wrote:
We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again
like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.
I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
were I used to buy milk and gas.
I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,
and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking (3)
Neither does it mean, however, we accept tidy, spoon fed explanations. The paradox is that psychiatry has been slightly better at solutions than causes – though the solutions are often hard fought, partial, and not without sometimes troubling trade-offs.
All Anne Sexton poems are from: Sexton, L. G. (Ed.). The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. 1999: Mariner Books.
(1) Michael McGuire and Alfonso Troisi, in their book Darwinian Psychiatry, remind: “….some persons with depression grow up and live in adverse social environments while others do not; some come from families in which depression is common while others do not; and significant individual differences in depression-causing physiological systems have been reported. What is more, some respond to one type of anti-depressant medication but not to another; some do not respond to any type of medication but do respond to electroconvulsive treatment; and some do not respond to any known intervention.” (Quoted by Andrew Solomon in Noonday Demon, p. 401
(2) Valenstein, E. S. (2000). Blaming the Brain. New York: The Free Press.
Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.
Peter Gabriel & Anne Sexton: Mercy Street - All My Pretty Ones
Happiness. Even as we chase it, we look upon it with suspicion. In the movie Annie Hall, Alvy (Woody Allen) runs across what looks like a happy couple.
Alvy: You look like a really happy couple? Are you?
Woman: Yeah.
Alvy: Yeah? So, how do you count for it?
Woman: I am very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Man: And I’m exactly the same way.
Happiness is not the domain of idiots, but that of the man/woman willing to throw him or herself into the mix of life’s uncertainties. Yoshida Kenko wrote, “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” If you get what Kenko is saying, then you may be able to grasp what it takes to be happy.
Happiness scrapes against our species’ natural inclination toward dissatisfaction. More food. More money. Sounds good, yet the gratification we feel from more and more only becomes less and less. On the other hand, if you let your guard down and things get bad enough, you can be taken out of the game completely.
from Garden of Earthly Delights (Hell), Hieronymus Bosch
It’s a sad fact of life — bad outcomes outnumber good ones. Loss gathers far more of our attention, than success. Our perceptual and emotional circuitry tends more toward fixating on our problems than celebrating our victories. Our inherent penchant for dissatisfaction is even encoded in our language. There are far more words for negative emotions than for positive ones.
If survival is deep inside our genetic programming, then being able to anticipate danger (even if wrong) is the best strategy. Enjoy those figs by the newly found watering hole too long, that saber-tooth tiger might jump out and make that fig your last. Remember, our genes only “care” for our well-being only so much as we can do the things we need to do to survive, mate, and pass those genes on. Feeling good about it all after the fact is incidental.
The good news? We are the only species who can tell our genes to go jump in the lake. But happiness takes work. It takes imagination and inner mettle to hold to it. At times, it is grainy and hard-edged, at others graceful and flowing.
Happiness is neither simple nor shallow. It requires a wide lens to navigate the complex, sometimes dismal horizon. The truly happy person owns his choices, without blame, while throwing himself at life in full view of this world’s nastiness, stupidity, and sorrow. She meets her fair share of grief, sadness, and trauma along the way. His ache is no less.
Henry Miller & friend
But one thing that seems to separate out the truly happy from the rest of us is the capacity to see something else beyond the immediate struggle. Within has been cultivated the deep abiding belief that with enough resilience, creativity, and capacity to endure, there is a way through. Happiness requires a refusal to resign oneself in face of whatever dark clouds break the horizon.
“The aim of life is to live, and live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” Yes, Mr. Miller. Yes.
Henry Miller. Does this sound like happiest man alive? Perhaps, yes.
When was the last time you felt that zing in your step? Sitting in front of a TV devouring a bag of chips? Or, when challenging your strength, endurance, eye-hand coordination, or capacity to build or create. It’s in our wiring to run, to lift, to hike, to climb, and work with our hands. Motion thrills us. We can become drenched in a glow of pleasure and satisfaction when we solve complex problems with our bodies.
From our earliest beginnings, we have scavenged, foraged, hunted, and migrated. We’ve populated every climate and terrain — a feat no other species can claim. For tens of thousands of years we beat unfathomable odds — defeating ice, torential rains, droughts, predators, mountain ranges, and raging waterways. How? By flaking stones, hollowing tree trunks, throwing spears, cutting branches, gathering fruits, mending hides, tying knots, and building fires.
We were groomed by natural selection and the forces of nature not only to survive, but to thrive in lands of scarcity, unpredictability, and danger. 2 million years of it. We’ve populated lands as varied as the savanna’s of Africa, the deserts of Arabia, the rain forests of Indochina, the frozen arctic ice scapes of Siberia and Alaska, the vast open plains of the Americas.
Today, however, we can spend months with our only physical challenge being a couple dozen daily walks to and from our refrigerators, cars, and computer screens. We can migrate from Detroit to Hong Kong in a comfortable 72 degrees, never to sweat, freeze, or feel a single raindrop moisten our skin. No one wants to turn back the time and return to the hardship and strife of our ancestors. Yet, has something been lost to us living in a world so stripped of physical challenge?
Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert has theorized that what we’ve gained in convenience we may have lost in activities that boost psychological resilience. Our brain’s reward circuitry exhibits far more activity when we expend effort to obtain a reward, than when there’s no expenditure of effort at all. Both physical and mental effort strengthens our brain’s reward-pleasure circuitry. Although we crave leisure, we are truly happier when engaging complex challenges.
Our brain’s pleasure/reward circuitry is dependent upon a neurotransmitter called dopamine and its corresponding dopamine receptors. When we exert ourselves in anticipation of that sought-after reward, happy dopamine pours into the system. This neuro-activity is what brings about that feeling of self-satisfaction. When we live a life that requires less and less physical effort, our dopaminergic system shrinks. Our reward circuitry fires less often and with less zing, perhaps making us more prone to depression, anxiety, and day-to-day numbness
You want to give your life a boost? Seek out activities that challenge and engage both your mind and body. Rock climb. Canoe. Garden. Take up pottery, tennis, woodworking, or slight-of-hand magic. Buy a motorcycle and let the wind blow across your face. Baby, we were born to run.
A lion smells a zebra. A songbird hears a sweet-to-his-ears response in some distant tree. You eye your neighbor’s new car. It’s that moment before the chase when the brain’s pleasure centers become awash in it’s favorite neurotransmitter – dopamine.
Our greatest pleasure seems to come in that moment before chasing that meal, mate, or brand new car. That’s when the burst of our natural pleasure chemical peaks. The reward itself? From the standpoint of dopamine, it’s little more than an afterthought.
Capture is sweet. Anticipation is sweeter, still. It’s a time-honored evolutionary strategy wired deep inside our nervous systems. When our pleasures were scarce, and the dangers were many, it was a strategy that helped us do the things we needed to do to survive. The state of anticipation revs up that much needed internal imperative to seek, to chase, to get up and make it happen – lions, tigers, and bears be damned! It’s what we call motivation.
The psychological term for this moment is the “appetitive stage.” It’s the time when expectation is tweaked and our appetite is whetted. When that burst of dopamine is released, pleasure surges so we actually get up and do the work to obtain what it is we need. The big cat perks its ears, lifts its nose to the wind. He’s gearing up to make his move.
Anticipation starts in our senses. A sight. A sound. A smell. It gets its boost at the cingulate gyrus. This ridge of cerebral cortex receives information from the eyes, ears, and nose. It then sends a message to the basal ganglia, which guides movement, and to the brainstem that stimulates our states of arousal. For we humans, this neuro-electro-chemical chain reaction can also start from a mere thought, fantasy, or idea. If the information is the right kind, we get an urge.
The nucleus accumbens is a closely connected brain area critical to our experience of pleasure and reward. It’s proximity to the brain’s motor system (the striatum) and the limbic system make it a critical intersect between emotion and action. We feel want. We anticipate reward. Pleasure starts to surge. Weight is given to whatever object we’re geared to seek, and thence it tugs and pulls at our attention. This nifty little system determines what’s worth pursuing. It’s a system that keeps us seeking. Keeps us working for that reward. (1)
You want to really light up pleasure’s Christmas tree? Add uncertainty to whether or not you’ll snag that zebra, mate, or brand new car. It’s why intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful of motivators. Will I get it, or will I not? Does he love me, or does he not? If you think you have a good chance, but you’re not sure, anticipation tops out in an exquisite burst of pleasure. Odds are it will be hard to stop yourself from doing something to get that answer, or seek that reward.
Beware that tweak of disappointment after the reward is seized. It may not be because the object desired is less desirable, but the contrasting withdrawal of dopamine between anticipation and capture. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Carly Simon, Anticipation
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(1) There’s increasing evidence that many addicts, especially cocaine addicts, develop a deficit in their pleasure-reward system. Some drugs wreak havoc on the dopamine receptors in the nucleaus accumbens. Often, such addicts experience low levels of motivation and very little of the internal reward buzz that keeps most of us engaged in those smaller, yet necessary, life moments.
“Dear Ms. Calle, I have recently been released from a long term relationship… I would like to spend the remainder of my mourning grieving in your bed…”(1)
Upon receiving this request, artist Sophie Calle packed up her bed and shipped it across the Atlantic with a note wishing the then stranger, Josh Greene, a quick recovery.
How do we mend a broken heart? (See my previous blog.) Heartbreak has forever defied the counsel of philosophers and physicians. (2) Virgil wrote, “It is an easy passage down to hell. But to come back, once there, you cannot well.” Homer’s warrior Euryalus bid “I can as soon leave love, as the Sun leave his course.” The agony can be excruciating. It can lead us to contemplate jumping from the highest of bridges(3) or, at other times, seeking comfort in the bed of a stranger.
Are we left to wandering Eternity in everlasting sorrow?
“The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules,” wrote Balthasar Gracian, the 17th c. Jesuit scholar.(4) Robert Burton, in his 16th c. work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, suggested exercise, diet, keeping busy, traveling, and the counsel of good friends — no different from what any good therapist would recommend today. (He also suggested fasting, sweating, bathing, and avoiding wine. Not bad ideas in themselves.)
These remedies aren’t a cure. They may only distract and soothe enough to help father Time work his magic. What if Romeo or Juliet had taken a few trips abroad, watched their diets, and took up jogging?
The best advice I read came from “Faith H” in response to a blog from a heart broken woman. “Spoil yourself, indulge, grab at all the good small things that come your way. Get away, somewhere different, preferably with a good friend who will listen to whatever mind numbing drivel you want to talk about HIM or whatever. Someone who will eat popcorn and drink bad wine and watch a few silly movies with you… Start making new memories. It never goes away completely but plans, girl, make big plans.” Robert Burton be proud.
As for Sophie Calle? After being dumped herself, and by e-mail no less, she distributed the text to 107 women professionals, photographed them reading it, and invited them to analyze the break-up e-mail according to their job. The ex’s grammar was torn apart by a copy editor, his lines used as target practice by a markswoman, second-guessed by a chess player, analyzed by a psychiatrist, and performed by an actress. “After a month I felt better…The project replaced the man.” She entitled the piece, Take Care of Yourself.
sophie
Another piece, Exquisite Pain, came at the end of another love affair. “Upon returning to France, I chose to recount my suffering rather than my trip.” She told everyone she met her story and then asked them to tell her their own stories of some event worthy of their suffering. Sophie wrote out their stories with accompanying photographs. In three months, she proclaimed herself cured due to the endless recounting of her story alongside its relativity to the excruciating suffering that others told to her.(5)
As for Sophie Calle’s bed? After several months, Josh Greene sent it back, his mourning over.(6) Perhaps the best way to ease that broken heart?
1) Calle, Sophie. Sophie Calle: M’as-Tu Vue. New York: Prestel, 2003.
2) Thomas Sydenham wrote in 1680: “Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.” It seems that Sydenham may have been right. If interested see Lewis, Thomas, M.D., Amini, Fari, M.D.; Lannon, Richard, M.D. A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage, 2001. pgs.94-96
3) There have been over 1200 suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge since it opened in 1937.
4) See Gracian, Baltasar. The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Trans. Christopher Maurer. New York: Doubleday, 1992. If you have the budget for only one self-help book to carry for you the rest of your life, this gem is the one!
5) She exhibited the piece almost 20 years later at the Pompidou Centre exhibition in 2003. See Guardian article.
6) Calle, Sophie. Sophie Calle: M’as-Tu Vue. New York: Prestel, 2003. The rest of the letter finishes: “Your bed has offered me comfort in so many ways, it will be difficult to replace Thank you again for your compassion. Warmest regards, Josh.”
Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains. With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise. Buddhists call it our 
