015.What’s cluttering up your life?（2分スピーチ）

What’s cluttering up your life?

As I observe my thoughts, as I observe my life, I notice that repetitive thought patterns tend to clutter up my life. For example, I tend to have thoughts related to fears about what might happen in the future, what might happen to my closest friends and family members, and fears about the possibility of a global health or economic crisis, just to name a few. I often find myself thinking about the origins of these excessive, repetitive thoughts that are occurring and I try to understand the basis for them. “Where do these troublesome thoughts come from, anyway?”, I often ask myself. I have reasoned that these thoughts are useful in some important ways, and thereby help me to avoid potentially dangerous existential type threats. For this reason, I have learned to give all my thoughts, no matter how negative, even the most negative thoughts, I have learned to give them their space. That is, I try to pay attention to them and try to find out what message, if any, they are trying to communicate to me. However, once these thoughts start unnecessarily repeating and accumulating in my mind in an uncomfortable way that interferes with my tasks or affects my emotional state in a way that I do not prefer, I then start to see these thoughts as unnecessary clutter in the same exact way that I would see actual, physical clutter in my home or in my room or in my closet. Through conscious efforts, I try to clear up the clutter of excessive thinking in my mind by performing actions like chores, exercise, helping other people, and especially meditative, creative expression. Decluttering my mind of excessive thought patterns results in the space for creative and positive thoughts to occur.