Have you ever had this happen?
You’re in the middle of an amazing thought. Not just a casual idea, but one of those rare ones that feels important. World-changing, or at least life-changing. The kind of thought where you’re not just thinking it — you’re engaging with it. You’re excited. You’re talking to yourself, turning it over from different angles. You can feel it locking into place. This is it, you think. This is the idea I’ve been waiting for. This explains everything. This fixes everything. My God — you can fix the world!
And then something interrupts you.
Maybe you’re driving and someone runs a red light and you have to slam on the brakes. Maybe you’re stopped at a train crossing. Maybe you wander into another room and notice a mess your kids made. Maybe your phone buzzes. Maybe you fart. Maybe nothing dramatic happens at all — just a small shift of attention. You let go of the thought as yoru awareness shifts to the distraction.
A moment later, you try to return to the thought. But it’s gone.
You know it was there. You remember how good it felt. You remember the certainty. You remember thinking, “Don’t forget this.” And yet, no matter how hard you try, you can’t grab hold of it again. You chase it. You circle around where it used to be. You think, What was I just thinking about? You desperately try reconstructing the path that led you there. You circle around it, trying to will it back to you.
Nothing. It’s vanished completely.
This is one of the most ordinary human experiences there is — and also one of the strangest. It has happened to all of us. Not once, but many times. It’s happened to us so many times that we barely remark on it anymore, even though it’s deeply weird when you stop and think about it.
What kind of thing can feel so real, so powerful, so certain, and then evaporate without a trace? What kind of thing can feel like you in one moment, and be utterly inaccessible the next?
But here’s the thing — the part that matters: you’re still here.
The thought may disappear, but you didn’t. The excitement fades, but you remain. Whatever that thought was, however important it seemed, it was not essential to your continued existence.
That alone should give us pause.
We tend to assume that our thoughts are us. We think that our inner voice is our identity — it is us. That the thing narrating our lives is the thing that is our lives. But this experience quietly contradicts that assumption.
If you were your thoughts, then losing one should feel like losing a piece of yourself. But it doesn’t. It’s frustrating, sure, even upsetting. But it’s not annihilating. There’s no sense of existential damage. Life goes on.
And here’s where it gets interesting. If that thought wasn’t you — the brilliant one, the perfect one, the life-changing one — then none of them are.
- Not the anxious thoughts.
- Not the angry ones.
- Not the self-critical ones.
- Not even the comforting ones.
The entire monkey in your head — the nonstop narrator telling a story about who you are, what happened to you, what might happen next: that isn’t you either. It’s just another stream of thoughts, doing what thoughts do.
Put another way, the you in your head is just a collection of thoughts, none of which are actually you. It’s a ghost. The ghosts in A Christmas Carol may not really exist, but the one in your head, the one you mistake for yourself, absolutely does.
Zen has been pointing at this for centuries, but you don’t need Zen texts or meditation retreats to see it. You just need to lose a really good idea while driving to the grocery store.
Thoughts are ephemeral. They arise, they linger briefly, they dissolve. Some return later, but some never do. And they do this without asking your permission. You don’t summon thoughts so much as notice them arriving. You don’t hold onto thoughts so much as hope they stick around.
And when they don’t, there’s nothing you can do about it. Well, you could do the sensible thing and write them down when you have them, but… c’mon, we almost never do that.
This becomes more noticeable as we get older. Maybe that’s because memory changes. Or maybe it’s because older people spend more time in abstract thought. Maybe it’s both. But even young people experience it. The difference is that younger people are often too busy to notice how strange it is.
As we slow down, the cracks become visible. And in those cracks is something quietly liberating.
If thoughts were truly you, then losing them would be catastrophic. But instead, what you lose is more like weather. A passing storm. A brief clearing. A sudden fog.
The sky remains.
Or maybe losing thoughts is more like the dreams we lose every night. A passing dream on a spring night. It’s brief, it’s lovely, then it disappears and we are still here.
This doesn’t mean thoughts are unimportant. Some thoughts change lives. Some shape history, and some deserve to be written down, protected, shared. But their importance doesn’t come from permanence. It comes from timing, context, and attention.
And here’s the Zen-ish turn: even when the thought is gone, the space that noticed it is still there. That space doesn’t rush. It doesn’t panic. It doesn’t need the thought to justify itself. It was there before the thought arrived, and it will be there after the thought disappears.
You might call it awareness. Or consciousness. Or just “being here”. Or just this.
Names don’t really help. What helps is noticing, again and again, that the thoughts come and go, like the ocean — and something else does not.
You are not your thoughts. You are you. And if you really understand that, you’ve kind of got it made.
Anyway. Just something worth considering. This Zenish reflection brought to you by a random thought that came to me while I was driving 😃 Thoughts are temporary.
[Title photo generated by ChatGPT]
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |