I don’t know if I’m careless… I certainly don’t always concentrate… well actually I do concentrate but not always on whatever it is I’m supposed to be concentrating on… my mind does wander away and wherever it is it is very careful, concentrated, focused – I am totally in whatever it is I’m thinking about. This may not be what I am supposed to be thinking about!
Do I have a butterfly mind? I wouldn’t call it a butterfly mind – not completely because my thoughts do settle and become engrossed in whatever I’m thinking about – and I tend to think that a butterfly mind suggest simplicity and superficiality, skipping playfully from flower to flower. I prefer monkey mind, a scampering, interested, intrigued, bounding, racing mind…
Michelle Reeves has written:
I decided that butterfly mind was a much kinder label than monkey mind with its connotations of wildness – even aggression – that has to be tamed
I guess I see monkeys as being energetic and interested and curious, and maybe rather than aggressive, courageous. I suppose it depends on what you think of monkeys… Wikipedia describes monkeys in the monkey mind sense as ‘unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable...’
- unsettled yes when I want to write and I’m not sure what I want to write; I’m a little like that at the moment because I’m working on my 1950’s book, but Radwinter 7 is knocking on my mental door!
- restless – as above
- capricious – in some ways, but I do stick to what I’m doing (sometimes too doggedly) No-one quite knows where the word capricious comes from ,it might be derived from the word for ‘goat’ – who knows, but since I’m a Capricorn I’ll take that as part of my astrological nature (if there is really any such thing!) … butterflies, monkeys, goats and now dogs…
- whimsical – I wouldn’t say I’m whimsical; I have a very practical prosaic side to my character – often obscured by the capricious side!
- fanciful – yup, that’s me
- inconstant – no, definitely not, I am very loyal, sometimes stubbornly loyal
- confused – I prefer muddled
- indecisive – sometimes over mainly trivial things… which ice cream flavour, beer or wine, wine or beer…
- uncontrollable – ummm, it depends… I think silly would be a better word
There is a Buddhist organisation called Wildmind, run by Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist teacher and author. He wrote a marvellous book which I reviewed here called ‘Living as a River‘ – I must reread it…
I have drifted away from what I was originally going to mention… true evidence of my butterfly/monkey mind. What I was going to say is that I don’t properly concentrate on what I’m doing, my thoughts elsewhere, so I might be driving to a supermarket and end up at the station, I might be going for a walk on the beach but go the wrong way and end up in the boatyard, I might be writing one part of a story and suddenly find I’m writing something else completely different… Once when I was at work I had arranged a meeting and wandered off to go to registrar’s office in town doing a favour for a friend… My boss wasn’t very pleased with me…
When I first set up this blog I was very excited… and unfortunately I was a little careless in filling in all the various bits and pieces to set it up. Would you believe it, I spelled my own name incorrectly! Hardly creditable is it? For six years I’ve had the wrong domain name but now all is well, I have corrected it and I am http://loiselsden.com
Hurrah!
Here is a link to Michelle Reeves site:
https://michellereevescoaching.com/
…and Wildmind:
… and my post on Living as a River:
https://loiselsden.com/2012/07/28/living-as-a-river/
…and lastly a link to my books – let me know if you enjoy them:
Lois Elsden 
I’m glad its not just me! I suffer from the same afflictions. Hope its not senility in my case…….
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