Exit Your Drifting Mind

MY FIRST ‘AHA’ MOMENT WITH MIND-DRIFT
I was sitting in a coffee shop visiting with my Dad. He was doing most of the talking. My head began to feel full, tight, I was losing track of exactly what he was talking about. Was it me, was my brain the problem, was I just not able to concentrate and follow what he was saying? Why was I becoming lost? What was going on here, why was I becoming confused and thick-headed while listening to him?

I put one of my mind tools to work, and I ‘sat outside’ the conversation; I became a watcher. In other words, I stayed sitting with my Dad, but I switched how my mind was working; instead of using most of my thoughts trying to follow him, understand and remember each thing he said and process it, I switched that part of my mind to autopilot, so to speak. I kept enough attention there to hear his words, vaguely know what was being said, to ‘being there’ enough to answer yes or no to any question that he lobbed my way…

…But I switched most of my mind to standing outside the conversation, as if I were a spectator. As if I was listening not to the actual things being talked about, but studying the dynamics of what was happening within this conversation. I tried to identify what patterns were we involved in, what exactly Dad was doing rather than what he was saying, what was I doing, what was really happening. The words became unimportant, I wanted to find out what dynamics, in this physical shape of a conversation, were leading me to have a tightened, confused mind.

So I sat back, still alert and involved and hearing him… yet also opening my mind and ‘backing out’, detached and outside the conversation, so I could peer in and see things on a behavioral level.

It became clear to me right away: ‘Hey, he’s topic surfing!’ I hadn’t heard that term before, it just popped into my head. He had begun talking about how a particular local piece of land was being used, something being built there…. then mentioned that the land was actually Indian-owned, part of the reservation was being leased for this new building to be created on… then he drifted into Indian affairs and Indian rights in Canada… then some history of these affairs and how some of it had been determined through wars… then how raw materials and their use in production and manufacturing had changed during the war due to shortage of metal and other materials, etc…

…And after about fifteen minutes of topic surfing, he stopped talking for a moment, canted his head sideways a little with a slightly confused look, trying to remember and figure out where he was. Then he said, “Oh yeah, anyways…”, and returned to his original topic, the current land use of that area we’d been discussing at the beginning.

You get it. I got it, sitting there. I suddenly saw, in a revelatory moment, that he had topic surfed, skipping from one topic to another abruptly, without awareness that it was happening, and that he had finally lost me and had forgotten what he’d originally been talking about. He just drifted. One statement triggered the next, but instead of triggering an on-track statement, it triggered each subsequent statement to drift a little more off-track. Each new statement or idea triggered a little side-journey, and after enough of these side-steps, the original topic had dissolved, we were both lost, and he had to take a moment to mentally search back through the topics, track back to where they started from.

WE ALL DO IT
I realized at that moment that everyone does this, to some extent. With some people it is common and rampant, and makes conversation very hard to follow for their listeners. This is especially common as we become more elderly, and our statements trigger more and more memories, stories we want to tell. We drift. For others, like my Dad and myself, it happens occasionally. After that Aha moment, I thought about my own habits of speech, and realized I had topic-surfed like this to others. Not often, but I remember some times I’d be like that, and in hindsight I remember how it shuts people down, confuses them, how they stop contributing after awhile and just sit quietly through it. It made sense now; there were times I’d lost myself and my listener through my occasional topic surfing blindness, and times I myself had become lost and uncomfortable, listening to others during their own topic surfing blindness.

Have you ever been listening to someone talk, and after awhile your brain tightens up and closes off, you realize you can’t follow what they’re saying anymore, you’ve completely lost your understanding or your train of thought? They started out telling a story or making a point, then they seemed to swerve into a new topic, and then another one, so seamlessly that you didn’t even feel it creeping up on you at first, and somewhere along the way you just got lost, gave up, let them talk. And often enough, they lost themselves, too.

Topic surfing is different than change of topic. With topic changing, there is some substance to your talk on a certain subject, eventually that substance plays out and then by general agreement you move on to another topic. That’s topic changing; but topic surfing is much different. Topic surfing is a drifting away, it denotes a lack of self-awareness while speaking, and a lack of clear focus on whatever points one is trying to make.

Topic surfing is the verbal equivalent to channel surfing on your TV. You watch one channel, then you flip around to see what is on other channels. This might be only during commercials, or you may flip between many shows at once, watching a few minutes of each, and checking the other channels in between to see if anything else catches your eye, maybe even forgetting the original show you started watching, losing connection with where you began in the first place. It’s so easy to channel surf in these modern electronic times, with handy remote controls, huge cable channel packages, satellite TV. Back in my younger years there was no such term as channel surfing, televisions only had a couple or a few channels, and before remotes were invented you had to get up off the sofa each time you wanted to change the channel, walk right to the TV and turn the ‘channel knob’. While you were at it, you’d probably have to readjust the ‘rabbit ears’, those twin adjustable antennae on the back of the old TVs, to pick up a clearer signal reception, since in those days the signal reception in televisions was spotty, it was weak or strong according to where you were in town. One place that had a pretty weak signal was a small town we lived in during the early 1970’s, a beautiful town on the coast of British Columbia called Bella Coola. My dad was a forest ranger there after we moved from Prince Rupert where he was attending ranger school. He had always loved being in the Forest Service and had started working for them in his teen years but finally needed to go to ranger school to learn more, so in Prince Rupert he…

THERE! Did you catch it? I just did a handful of topic surfs for you. It was seamless, one thing flowed into another through the paragraph. It all seemed like part of this chapter I’m writing, yet I began the paragraph with explaining topic surfing and then moved off base to TV signal reception in the ‘olden days’, then moved on to places I’ve lived and my dad’s job preference, etc. I’ll bet that at the end of that paragraph, you were already starting to lose track of the point of what you were reading; if I’d gone on much longer, your mind would lose entirely what we were originally talking about. Your mind began to get sucked into the funnel of confusion along the straying chain of topics I surfed, one blending into the next until you were lost.

IT HAPPENS IN MANY WAYS
Mind-drift, in conversation, happens often and in so many ways. You see happen it in others, you do it yourself. We all do it to various degrees. At a mild level, we’ll be telling a story, making a point, and somewhere along the way, something we’ve just said will trigger us to go off-track, derailing ourselves from the natural progression of our original point. Each statement we make is a jumping-off point that leads us to our next statement; each next statement can either be tightly in line with what we just said… or it can stray aside. When we don’t pay much attention to staying on-track, then the straying begins. We happen to say something, it triggers some memory of something else, and before we realize it we’re careening along multiple paths, way off to the side of the path we originally began on. We haven’t changed the subject or topic, rather we’ve forgotten we were even on a topic in the first place, and we’re sliding away from it without consciously intending to do so.

Here’s one way it happens; you can call this form of mind-drift ‘related information overload’, if you like: perhaps you are listening to a business presentation, or are in a teaching situation, where the speaker is trying to give so much information, bring in so many facts, they keep leaving the main direction of their topic in order to ‘make sure you get every detail’. They constantly and consistently interrupt the flow of what they are saying so they can inject things they just remembered, facts that shouldn’t be left out, explanations of what they just said… all of which can careen far out of control and muddle the original topic so badly that it turns your straining mind into mulch.

Someone is speaking about a subject, and they inject so much related information, dates, facts, side-stories, even long tangents of side-stories, that you just become lost in the paper trail overload that issues from their mouth. That is a common form of topic surfing among high-energy people, professionals, passionately creative people. They deliver so many thoughts so quickly, they topic surf down so many sidelines, tossing them all in the blender for you, delivering statements in a way that is off-balance and careening. You can’t help but become lost when listening, and they will often become lost themselves. They are delivering ideas they think are organized, yet you are hearing them as ramblings that swerve and careen along zigzag paths that become difficult and often impossible to follow. They have a thousand things to say, but they have not organized it in their minds or their speech, they have a gaping lack of the self awareness and calm clarity that would allow them to slow down, order their ideas and stories so they roll off tongue in a clear and sequential delivery, create a delivery in some pleasant form that will actually make clear sense to you, the listener.

Another common form of mind-drift is just the opposite, let’s accurately call it ‘absent minded drifting’. Rather than the speaker wanting to cram you full of information, where each thing they say triggers a reminder for them to tell you ten more related things so you get every last detail, absent minded drifting is the opposite. During absent minded drifting, the speaker feels no need to deliver much information to you, they are talking more for themselves. They start telling you about one thing, then before they’ve completed that idea they’re off and drifting into something else that was just triggered. Maybe during a story, they suddenly want to remember the date of this event. The date becomes really important to them, so they’ll try to figure out other things that happened then, so they can figure out the date.

The original topic is jettisoned like a used rocket stage, and now they’re hooked like a fish onto the new triggered topic. They remember the date finally, and it triggers them to tell some other story that happened in their life around that time. And some statement they make about that event, causes them to drift into yet another story, and another. They’re drifting, cut loose along a winding river, with no real purpose and not trying to stay with any particular topic, rather they’re just letting their conversational whims carry them randomly along that winding river.

UNRAVELED THREADS = NO MORE FABRIC
Both these main forms of drifting mind arrive at the same destination: the speaker, and the listener, end up in a lost place. When each thread of thought and conversation comes apart from the previous and the next, eventually the topic, the conversation, the understanding, the clarity all unravel and are lost. This is usually much more annoying to the listener than to the speaker. The speaker is often having a fine time, spewing forth whatever stories and knowledge they want, enjoying hearing themselves talk, because once a speaker reaches this lost stage of tripping into the black hole of drifting, they are no longer speaking to interest the listener. They are just flapping their lips, spewing their thoughts, but all consideration of what is really coming out of their mouths, and how it is being understood and taken in by the listener, is gone.

Related-information-overload screams along many mixed-up paths to finally arrive at a condensed mass of confusion and lostness. Absent minded drifting meanders down-path to entropy, to a falling apart until you don’t know how it all got so far away from the original subject, you don’t even know where the conversation is anymore. A mind that is drifting, and is unaware of its own drifting, ends up lost, confused, overwhelmed. The speaker drifts aimlessly into pointlessness, they race down so many side-roads that the central highway disappears.

I, and you, have been confused into a dead-end by someone who gets lost, for moments or minutes or even hours, in their drifting mind. And to various degrees, we have mind-drifted ourselves, to the point of losing our own place, forgetting the story or point we started with at the beginning.

EXIT YOUR DRIFTING MIND
A drifting mind doesn’t really hurt anyone. But when you visit with someone, when you deliver information to others, the most important part of your communication is to effectively and clearly get across what you are saying, right? When your talk starts to fall apart and you are no longer being followed by your listeners, what is the point of talking? When their heads are mush from your topic surfing, your drifting mind… communication is over. It’s over, until you realize that you’ve drifted, and you exit your drifting.

In casual conversation, gossip, hanging around talk, drifting mind is common, everyone does it at some time. Some people allow it to become their primary conversational trend. Professionally, a drifting mind, and especially the topic-surfing form, is efficiency-suicide, it quickly lets those around you know that your mind is not organized, not clear, not efficient in your delivery of information.

But I don’t need to write a handful of tips for you to organize your thoughts, deliver them in a balanced way without straying into information-overload or straying off-topic; simply giving you the term ‘Drifting Mind’, or ‘Topic Surfing’, and describing those a little, now gives you awareness of it. The next time you are in conversation with someone and you find yourself becoming lost or confused due to their drifting mind, their topic surfing, or the next time you see your listener becoming lost due to your own drifting mind…

…You will remember this. You’ll step outside your conversation for a moment, look at the dynamics from an outside viewpoint, and be able to tell if one or both of have become lost on that runaway train of drifting mind.

You just exit it.

It’s as simple as that. No huge spiritual wisdom ninja tricks needed. You will simply exit out of your drifting mind, and become clear, here again. With your awareness that you’re drifting, you exit the drift and become here again, and it happens that simply and that instantly.

When you become more aware of drifting mind each time it begins to happen, eventually you will lose the habit; it will become natural for you to flow along an ordered, straight course in your thoughts and conversations. You will be clearer, you will communicate your thoughts much more clearly on all levels, you will give more accurate and interesting and edited information to everyone you talk to, and this will help all your relationships become clearer.

And if you become better at exiting your drifting mind even while you’re just thinking to yourself, your mind and life will REALLY advance.

EXIT YOUR DRIFTING MIND