A Hopeful, Realistic Parade Of Ideas

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One way of understanding your daily experience is to recognize how thoughts and emotions pass through you all day. Sometimes they fall into patterns that you can recognize for good or for ill. Early psychologists called it stream of consciousness, and novelists like William Faulkner and James Joyce explored this phenomenon in their characters.

We don’t always choose which thoughts and emotions pass through us, but we can choose how to direct them.

How To Direct Your Own Thoughts And Emotions

Learn how to direct your thoughts and emotions by engaging daily with hopeful patterns of thought. Here are two examples

  1. Monks gather to recite psalms, which lead their minds and hearts through a sometimes joyful, sometimes fearful, but always in the end hopeful and comforting series of ideas.

  2. In a novel, poem, play or movie an author leads an audience through a series of ideas about characters and their actions.

Over time, exposing yourself to positive and realistic patterns of thought and emotion outweighs the negative ideas.

Choose Your Focus Over The Long Term

With a reservoir of good thoughts and emotions, you can direct the thoughts and emotions you encounter in yourself and in others. Social media actually reveals how you do this to yourself, for better or worse. Algorithms feed you more of what you’ve chosen in the past. They essentially speed up the process of revealing how you are shaping your own thoughts and emotions. The same process is also at work in things like your possessions, friendships, conversations, and physical environment, which also reflect the thoughts and emotions you choose to put into your life.

How To Start

Set aside time daily to think back on the most powerful ‘thought and emotion moments’ of your day. Most importantly, set aside time daily to expose yourself to a hopeful and realistic parade of ideas. Here is a psalm and a poem to get you started.

Psalm 70

Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
    O Lord, make haste to help me!
2 Let those be put to shame and confusion
    who seek my life.
Let those be turned back and brought to dishonour
    who desire to hurt me.
3 Let those who say, ‘Aha, Aha!’
    turn back because of their shame.

4 Let all who seek you
    rejoice and be glad in you.
Let those who love your salvation
    say evermore, ‘God is great!’
5 But I am poor and needy;
    hasten to me, O God!
You are my help and my deliverer;
    O Lord, do not delay!