I caught myself mid-thought this morning, standing at the kitchen counter with my hand hovering over the coffee maker. The thought was: You should have started writing earlier. Just like that, a small voice of judgment, arriving uninvited before I'd even taken my first sip.
The interesting part wasn't the thought itself—I've heard that voice a thousand times. What struck me was the gap between noticing it and believing it. For just a moment, I watched it float by like a cloud, neither pushing it away nor pulling it closer. It was there, and then it wasn't, and the coffee kept brewing with its familiar gurgling sound.
I've been thinking lately about how often we treat our thoughts as facts rather than events. A thought appears, and we immediately start building a case around it, gathering evidence, preparing arguments. But what if we didn't? What if we just let them arrive and depart, the way we let sounds come and go?