Crockpotting

Do you ever do this? Marinate something all the live long day? Maybe even a couple of days?

But unlike food that tends to be cooked slowly over time while you attend to other things, your mind gets worse, tougher, dried out, over done.

Crockpotting is such a good metaphor to describe the process by which our minds over cook an idea, feeling or emotion. Putting it on simmer and allowing it to marinate to our own demise.

Being a vegetarian, I am not really a crock potter. Crockpots better left to meat eaters. Veggies tend to fall completely apart and become unrecognizable to all after a few hours. But my head still operates sometimes like a crockpot. Stewing on things, overcooking them. Allowing them hours and hours of time to marinate and gel.

And I have noticed that my minds tends to marinate those thoughts that are negative. The positive ones pop to the surface and are either taken for granted, or summarily dismissed. Regardless, it is the negative ones, usually about myself that tend to linger.

And as usual, those negative thoughts only get to stick around because I am afraid there is some truth in them. Some kernel of veracity that makes them take root and branch. Ok, now my metaphors are quickly melting away. I am now apparently growing trees in my crockpot...so much for literary accomplishment.

I find it interesting as to why my mind is really only capable of ruminating on the negative. I do not seem overly excited about the positive things my mind thinks. Why is crock potting solely reserved for the bad, the hard, the painful and the fear based thoughts? Why is the crockpot cursed to only marinate the sour meats of my mind?

I guess it is easy to take the good stuff my mind produces and dismiss it, or take it for granted. Allowing things that are positive and meaningful to sit idle or burst like an air bubble hitting the surface. Where as the negative ones seem to have more of a need to take their time, like they are lost and in search of a home. They require a great deal of time to rise, be acknowledged and put to rest.

I am not sure about you, but I have several negative thought processes that never seem to go away. I am forever working on them. Dealing with them. Desperately trying to turn off and clean out the crock pot as I am not really interested in eating the dish my mind is always wanting to serve. I am tired of allowing those kinds of thoughts to dominate but it seems that I am not always in charge of what goes into the thought pot. Sometimes the thoughts just come and I am at their mercy.

I have endeavored to put myself on a thought diet. To remove the negative, coercive junk food of my mind, instead begin a juice fast. But it seems no matter how I try, those same fucking thoughts return year after year. New thoughts on an old thread.

Perhaps it is time to throw out the damn pot. I mean what have I really cooked in it for years? Nothing worth eating, that is for sure. Perhaps my interior would be better suited if there was something more nutritious for it to feed upon. Something that is not cooked for hours, to be eaten later. Perhaps more of a raw mental diet would be better for me. Fresh, crunchy and packed with vitamins and minerals instead of cooking the literal shit out of them.

Perhaps. Perhaps this is just a stupid metaphor for me dancing around the fact that sometimes my mind feels like a war zone to me. It is a battle ground that I survive daily. Constantly trying to find relief from the source that I take with me wherever I go. It isn’t so much that I am crock potting, perhaps it is more what I intend to make in the first place.

What is one to do?

Begin again, I guess...

To ferret out those ideas, thoughts and emotions that cause me to think less of myself, or you. To deal with the trauma that causes me to feed too long on outdated ideas, fears and issues that are really no longer germane to my life. Hell, I don’t even like stew. So why in the fuck do I keep cooking a mental stew that causes me so much heartburn?

Habit?

Perhaps.

But habit is just a convenient excuse for a more systemic issue. The tendency of me to grant myself passage on things that are better checked and removed. Entire processes, like crock potting, eschewed for a cleaner diet. A new refusal to return to the habits of old, a new methodology for cooking, thinking.

Steeping thoughts more enjoyable like thought of as a pot of tea. Tea isn’t heavy like the ingredients tossed into the pot. Tea is ethereal, it is breathy, it is vapor rising, rising, rising. Perhaps one can trade in the crock potting, for tea preparation. A tea ceremony instead of the heavy labor of prepping dinner over hours.

And perhaps I just need more sleep so that my mind will not think such ridiculous thoughts...that I will be relieved of the melancholy musings of crock potting and tea service.

Yet today I am here. Thinking things, feeling things, all marinating within the confines of my mind. None of it really rising. All of it feeling quite heavy and difficult. Perhaps I can just fall back asleep and enjoy a few more minutes of contented slumber, where my thoughts do not feel like they have been up for hours, plotting against me while I attempt to wake to a new day. Free from the culinary demise of decades long past.

And yet, I am awake as the new day dawns. My choice, always my choice, what to feed myself and what to skip. Perhaps I need to stare down the diet of the day and make some better choices, even just one. One different decision is much more likely to deliver me to somewhere new...somewhere I am not standing in my kitchen looking at the marinated, crockpotted sewage of my mind. Perhaps it might be time to see that the set up is all in the name: crock. pot. Well, there you go!