It is stunning how much time I spend lost in my own thoughts, and how so much of the trouble and trials I experience are localized between my ears. This morning I meditated on the following teaching from Sri Maharaj Nisargadatta:
Once you know with absolute certainty that nothing can trouble you but your own imagination, you come to disregard your desires and fears, concepts and ideas and live by truth alone.
I am incredibly fortunate to live a life in which biggest troubles are of the mind and not the body, there are many around me who are suffering disease, privation, or mental illness; but if you are like me I would imagine even a brief moment of self-examination would disclose a similar tempest in a teapot.
In the words of the genre-bending band twenty one pilots:
Am I the only one I know
Waging my wars behind my face and above my throat
There is comfort in knowing that, no, we are not alone in waging this war of thoughts and emotions.