One of the hardest things, when you are starting to meditate – or restarting to meditate – is getting lost in your thoughts. You sit down, fully committed, still your body, and start to meditate, only to find your mind going down some path, planning the day, reliving a previous day, obsessing about some thought.

The comedian, Wanda Sykes, has a great routine where she talks about going to the beach in Florida, where she has this whole internal conversation with one of the beautiful young bikini-clad women that she imagines judging her for daring to wear a bathing suit at her age. I love this comic bit because it is so true of how our minds work, especially when we are trying to meditate. We start by saying, “I’m really looking forward to the beach, so relaxing.” And before you know it, we’re threatening to cut some stranger that probably isn’t paying attention to someone like us anyway. How do we get from point A to point B? So we laugh at ourselves and try to retrace the route before we recognize that retracing the route is a trap: it is also thinking.

Some mornings, when I come into my office, I feel overwhelmed just by turning on my laptop. My whiteboard is full of thoughts from a month ago, someone handed me a stack of papers which are piled up on my desk willy-nilly – not my papers but now my mess – even the files on my laptop seem haphazard: in-box 100, lots of bolded messages waiting in Slack or Teams, tickets popping up. My mind feels disorganized. How do I regain order in this mess of chaos.

Usually it starts by stepping away. Close the laptop with the ever-increasing number of problems. Sweep the papers off the desk and into the trash. Take down the papers taped to the walls. Clean the whiteboard – a chore frustrating to a recovering perfectionist because you can never quite get that blue dry-erase marker off. It’s always there in a shadowy smear.

And then what? And then a moment to enjoy the clean slate.

Before I begin filling it back up again. I like a big whiteboard, a space where my thoughts and ideas are not constricted by a tiny screen. I begin to make my thoughts manifest on the blank surface: what if this? …or this? …or what if we organized it like THIS? …or what if…

And soon it becomes clear, organized, categorized, as if mapping it out visually cut through the chaos and brought it into order. Only then can I dive back into the conflicts, the demands, the pivots without getting trapped by each one.

And what is the meditation equivalent of this?

For me, it is Watching the Waterfall. When I find myself starting to play Whack a Mole with my thoughts, I stop fighting them and just let them flow, cascading over me like a water. I resist the urge to grasp at them and take control of them as if trying to capture raindrops, but let them stream, amused by how many thoughts I actually have and how fast they flow.

One of the things we don’t appreciate is how much information we are exposed to each day. 200 years ago, the majority of people couldn’t read: the information they were exposed to consisted of gossip that they heard from friends and connections, perhaps a man on a soapbox, or a preacher, or someone reading out the news; and what they could glean from nature, the shift in the wind or tide, the pattern of tracks through the wood, the length of the fur on a caterpillar. 100 years ago: books, newspapers, films, radio, magazines. 50 years ago: television. 35 years ago: 24-hour news. 25 years ago, the internet in a basic form and email. 20 years ago, the start of social media. 10 years ago, Slack and Teams. And now, AI.

The amount of information that we take in every day overwhelms our ability to control or make sense of it. Some try to use technology to manage it: AI to sort through our mail and messages and take meeting notes for us, which just creates more noise. Some use heuristics: just reading headlines or choosing their news from YouTube recommendations, building a one-sided surface view of the world. Some go cold-turkey and shut out information, then are surprised when they hear how bad some things have gotten.

I picture a giant swell of a wave of noise, rising towards the sky, conflicting voices, chatter, Reddit AITA mixed with Breaking News mixed with the latest Hollywood Gossip and press releases and rumor and ideas and opinions, rising like a tower of babel.

And it is all just noise.

Just sound waves against our eardrums, creating patterns.

Meaning nothing, really.

Unless we choose it to.

Just a waterfall.

Rain.