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Analysis paralysis
By Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut
Faulty strategies and partial paradigms
Think about you: What would you say just now to yourself, if you that is, had something to say to yourself?
How would you phrase it? What would the general gist of your observation towards you be?
How does it change from moment to moment? What can you do to change that?
These very questions, silly as they sound, are reflective of what we always seem to be internally asking, day in and day out. Our minds are the culprits; they are asking all the questions. And they are forever analyzing, trying to break our selves down into small, more recognizable bites.
We are putting ourselves under microscopes. We are smashing ourselves down into small bits and pieces, trying to figure out how it all the little parts work.
Most of the "show" is being played out in our unconscious spaces, which occupy most of us. In the sub-world of our being, the puzzle pieces are laid out, and moved around endlessly to find an effective and enduring lock.
In our present (and vastly more civilized?) times, we've gone even further. We are paying others (paying professional others) to plumb the depths of our brains, and tell us what they see and don't see.
These others went to various "brain-map" schools; they know for us what is good for us. They can analyze us, and help us snap together some of those tricky pieces, and we will be better off for it all
Right?
Maybe...and then again maybe not - who can know for sure?
There's a clear problem and that is that these enlightened days of modernity often cast long, dark shadows on our existential existence. The "experts" have chosen paths towards our healing that have left our wounds still open, and as we opened up our pockets to pay for it, emptiness reigned still, albeit, even more.
The "brains" offered reasons for why our unhappiness had the upper hand. They explained them to us, and we thought we even understood for a minute there.
They told us about our past, and about our personality, and drew a picture of an impossible paradigm that couldn't be easily budged.
Through their opened eyes, we saw our victim-hood, as it wove its way through our childhood, to our adult-hood. The pack of wolves that had surrounded us had names like family, society, biology and genetics.
They further dug us down.
They call them (affectionately?) shrinks. Think about that. Do we want our brain shrunken, or expanded? Shouldn't they think of themselves, rather than being knows as shrinks, to be thought of as expanders, or brain stretchers?
At any rate, as we prepared to emerge from sessions with them for what was to be our liberation, we saw that what we had at first seen, was not all there was to see. Now we walked away knowing so much more, and seeing how great our dilemmas still remained.
In our dissection, we were ever more exposed.
Analysis paralysis. We have been analyzed to death, and we've come to do it, too, on ourselves. What we really needed (all along!) was some straight, simple talk, and a solution suggestion
or two.
With that, the debilitation of these moments surely would not have been so predominate.
So, in other words, rather than kill things with analysis, we are not nearly so violent with it. We go inside, alone, and there we find basic solutions to what ails us.
Coming back out again, we may move towards those solutions, and seek and find the courage within us to know that our linkage with God will enable us to complete every step involved.
In time, freed and liberated, and once again restored to a knowing of what is, what isn't and what differs between those two very different fields of reality, we might be ready to know some simple, basic peace.
How sweet this can finally be.
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