I have spent a lot of my life shifting problems and solutions around in my mind like furniture. While this keeps the frantic monkey busy, it solves nothing. It increases my heart rate, makes my breath shallow, and my mouth snappy. I have never gotten a useful course of action from this business.

Somewhere in the last week or more, I’ve grabbed onto the notion that I don’t have the answer in that room where the monkey-mind plays with idea-furniture.

Somehow I’ve realized there are answers beyond my understanding. Really grasped in a usable way that “there are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in [my] philosophy.”

I can see the small room where I think I have the answers, and I see that it’s held by infinite possibility. I know that it is surrounded and potentially subsumed by the myriad amazing “other.”

What I’ve begun to do is recognize when I’ve unleashed a furniture rearranging party with a monkey. I see it happening. I call it what it is. And then I take my viewpoint, which has narrowed down to a pinprick dot, and pull back from it, opening up to an unknowable but available infinity of answers.

Then I wait.