The Work of the Mind

The mind, basically, is a pattern-seeking machine.  

~Stephen Jay Gould

Do you know what your brain is doing behind your back?  Without your permission?  Ala wild-wild-west, rogue cowboy style?  

I'll tell you what it's doing.

It's looking around at all the loose odds and ends in your life and grabbing pairs of them and tying them into knots.  It's making connections.  It's finding patterns.  

And it's finding them under every rock!  ;)

Oh, don't get me wrong - it isn't working completely randomly.  It tries to pair up its and pieces that might conceivably go together...  

The things is, the human mind is so incredibly flexible, it can pretty much find a way to justify just about any cockamamie pairing that a random number generator could ever come up with!  

And so, why am I not getting any sewing done?  Oh, you know, I'm pretty stressed at work right now...  And I've got this long commute (2.5 hours per day) that eats up a lot of may day, not to mention that ESL class that I teach on Tuesday nights...  Oh, don't forget that we've just taken in a foster teen, which is a huge adjustment and drain on my time...  

All perfectly conceivable connections, right?  

So, if those are true, then why is it that, the minute I clean up the cutting table in my sewing room, I suddenly find myself sewing up a storm?  

Could it be that my mind jumped to a faulty conclusion or two?  ;)

Could it be that the thing holding me back from doing more sewing was nothing more complicated or deeply-rooted in my psyche than some clutter?  

And, the most important question of all - does this mean I need to clean up my desk at work?  ;)