I’ve come to find a strange humor in a bored mind. It never stays bored for long.
Idle hands, idle mind—the devil doesn’t even have to clock in; the mind does the work on its own.
Everything’s going well?
Absolutely unacceptable.
Too quiet. Too peaceful. Let’s fix that.
So the mind gets busy.
What should we worry about today?
My health?
My life?
Something someone might have meant?
Is my family okay—right now, at this exact second?
And off we go.
With impressive efficiency, I take the peace I’ve been given and toss it straight out the door. I worry about things that don’t exist yet—or may never exist at all. Hypotheticals dressed up as emergencies. Fiction posing as responsibility.
Which raises an uncomfortable question:
What’s so wrong with things being okay?
Better yet—what’s so threatening about things being good?
Eckhart Tolle once described his own breaking point in his thirties, deep in depression, when he asked a simple but life-altering question:
“What am I going to do with me?”
In that moment, something cracked open. He realized there were two at work.
The I—the observer, the witness, the quiet presence.
And the me—the ego, the mind, the pain-body, endlessly narrating and catastrophizing.
They were not the same.
The suffering wasn’t caused by life itself, but by believing the voice that never stops talking about it.
And once those two were separated, the mind lost its monopoly. It could still speak—but it no longer ran the house.
Maybe that’s the real practice:
Not fixing the mind.
Not silencing it.
Just noticing it—and choosing not to follow it when nothing is actually wrong.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind.”
— 2 Timothy 1:7
Closing Prayer
God,
When my mind grows restless in moments of peace,
Help me recognize the difference between the voice that speaks
and the presence that listens.
Teach me to rest when nothing is wrong,
and to trust that quiet is not a threat.
Return me to this moment,
where You already are.
Amen.
