Cold Winters of the Mind

Today has to be one the coldest days I have experienced in a while, with tomorrow promising to be a low of minus 21. In times like these, mere "survival" feels good, including the comforts of having a place to live. But it also makes me think about what I call the cold winters of the mind: surviving the extremities of one's own thoughts.
   One of the things I have observed recently is how hard it is to make decisions or think clearly when I am generating mental images of what could possibly happen and yet doesn't. It as though the mind becomes frozen in the tundra and ice of its own inner movies and reflections. When I started to read Guo Gu's book about Gong-ans, called Passing Through the Gateless Barrier, I had these moments of clarity, where I started to realize that most of my thoughts are just a lot of irrelevant garbage. Such thoughts are not real solutions; they are only playing with remote possibilities and thus getting involved in one's stories about what they think should or will happen. No, nothing extraordinary happened in those moments: I didn't have any light experiences or sudden flashes of inspiration. Rather, it just became so apparent what I need to do to resolve my problems. A certain elegance of thinking started to kick in, in those brief moments of clarity, where I could see the problem in its specificity, rather than getting mired in hypothetical selves and constructions. Truly, it gave me an impression that the way to solving problems is not through visualizing scenarios, but actually through cutting off/through these scenarios to get to a vivid core. It also means not being so absolutistic about one's thinking, but to allow for exceptions and conditions. This is a kind of mindset that can negotiate reasonably with others rather than being so afraid of hurt feelings or fall-outs.
  I think the elements of such thinking include 'non-dwelling'-- not getting mired in thinking to the point where one inhabits the worlds of one's thoughts.  In addition, humility is a big part of it--not priding myself on "my thoughts", "my great insights" or "my problems", as though such problems have never arisen before in others. But perhaps most importantly is an ability to relativize: to see that the problems I am faced with are actually the result of conditions that can be altered, but only if one can tolerate being with them for a while to see how they unfold. This in turn requires a space of non judgment and just sitting in the problem rather than trying desperately to sidestep it. These seem to be a way to transform one's frozen worlds of indecision and worry into fluid worlds where one can entertain new conditions without trying to avoid the situations one is in.