Is Your Life Full of Useless Dusty Thoughts?

Psychological dust

My sister Carolyn and I relaxing in the lounge room at Evergreen just as a beam of sunlight illuminated part of the floor, revealing dust!

Yesterday I was relaxing with my sister in our lounge room when a powerful beam of sunlight sneaked through an eastern window and illuminated a part of the floor. I was horrified at the dust it revealed. Time to get out the vacuum cleaner!

While doing this mundane chore I recalled words I’d read in the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s book, The Flame:

There’s no one else

 there’s nothing else

can move the dust but you

He wasn’t alluding to the fuzzy coating on floors because famous poets don’t write about housework. He was referring to psychological dust.

Ordinary dust, the stuff I was sucking up with my trusty light-weight battery-operated Anko vacuum cleaner bought on special from Kmart, is a mixture of unsavoury things like dirt, bacteria, fabric fibres, spider legs, hair follicles, dead bugs and skin cells.

However, psychological dust is composed of tiny, highly reproductive, negative, long-living, unhelpful thoughts that we coat ourselves with.

We coat ourselves with labelling thoughts about being male, female, tall, short, fat, thin, awkward, urbane, rich, poor, black, white, righteous, sinner, famous, forgotten, smart, dumb, young, old, healthy, sick, important, disposable . . . 

You may see yourself as a short, awkward, smart, young person. Or a tall, old, forgotten, sick individual. But that’s just psychological dust.

Another type of psychological dust is our habitual thoughts about things that happen which we refuse to accept.

When we’re stuck in traffic, we fret and fume, wishing everyone else would stay at home so we could have the freeway to ourselves. When we don’t get what we want we express anger or resentment instead of gracefully moving on. We shake an impotent fist in the air at what we perceive to be the idiocy of others and fail to see the idiocy in ourselves.

When life circumstances force us to become aware of our personal burden of dust, we can either ignore it, deny it, blame it on someone else, or go running to others and pay them to get rid of it for us.

But, like Cohen wrote, ultimately, we’re the only ones who can eliminate our own psychological dust.

But psychological dust can’t be sucked away by a vacuum cleaner.

How to Get Rid of Psychological Dust

The only way to get rid of psychological dust is to watch the habitual, unhelpful thoughts you have.

Watch them like a hungry hawk watches a plump mouse skittering through the undergrowth.

Don’t get angry about these thoughts. Don’t deny, ignore or even worry about them.

Just watch them.

For example, you’re stuck in crawling traffic on the freeway. Your lips tighten and a frown forms as you think, Why doesn’t everyone else stay at home so I can have the freeway to myself? 

Just settle back into your seat and watch that thought as it spins repeatedly through your brain. Is it a sensible and fair thought or is it nonsensical? Does it make the traffic go faster? Does it cause a police escort to arrive to clear the way for you? What purpose does this thought fulfill besides putting your body under unnecessary stress?

Believe it or not, watching a thought that creates psychological dust makes it dissolve as quickly as jelly crystals in a bowl of boiling water.

Try this technique next time you have a habitual, unhelpful thought.

Remember what Leonard Cohen wrote:

There’s no one else

 there’s nothing else

can move the dust but you

With love, Marlane