The Wandering Mind

On curiosity, hidden gifts, and the gentle discipline of returning with the fruit.

I have a wandering mind.

For years I thought that was simply one of my strengths.

It turns out it was also the reason I sometimes feel stuck.

I’m not taking about the kind of mind that forgets where the keys are (although that’s a given), but the kind that wanders through ideas, conversations, people’s expressions, pauses, and half-finished sentences.

It collects things. Like a magpie attracted to shiny objects.

A phrase someone said three years ago.
A gesture in the corner of a room.
A paragraph in a book that connects to yoga philosophy, which links to neuroscience, which reminds me of a client conversation, which suddenly becomes a whole new framework… before breakfast.

It’s a generous mind.
A mind that rarely travels in straight lines.

It reads the room before the meeting has even started. It senses when something is off long before anyone says a word. It sees patterns where others see fragments.

A strength.

But here is the truth about strengths:

Every strength carries a shadow.

The wandering mind gathers too much.

Too many ideas.
Too many impressions.
Too many signals.

And suddenly the mind that was meant to weave meaning is standing in the middle of a vast warehouse of information thinking:

“WTF do I do with all of this?”

It turns out wandering endlessly through the universe of ideas is not the same thing as creating something from it.

At some point I have to come back with the fruit.

Otherwise I’m just a very enthusiastic tourist in the land of possibility.

A friend and coach once asked me:

“Are you one of those people who can read the energy of an entire room?”

“Yes!” I said.

She replied very calmly:

“Do you know that you don’t have to?”

The discovery that this was optional felt almost scandalous.

For years I assumed that if the signal was there, I had to receive it. If the room was speaking energetically, I had to listen.

All of it. All the time.

Which, as you might imagine, is a wonderful strategy if your goal is complete and total exhaustion.

Apparently there was another option.

I could… not.

I could choose when to tune in and when to turn the volume down.

Around the same time I noticed a similar pattern of “overdoing”.

When I took the VIA Character Strengths assessment, my top strength was gratitude.

Which sounds lovely. And it is.

But it came with an enthusiastic shadow.

When someone did something kind for me I would say:

“Thank you so much. Truly.”

Then five minutes later:

“Really, thank you.”

And then again.

At some point I joked that perhaps the only appropriate response was simply to pay their mortgage.

Eventually I noticed something.

If I was thanking so much… was I actually receiving?

So I tried a different approach.

When someone offered me a gift, I would simply say:

“Thank you.”

Once.

And stop.

No gratitude marathon.

At first it felt uncomfortable.

Now it feels natural.

Because gratitude, I’ve learnt, also includes the ability to receive.

It’s all about balance.

Curiosity is beautiful. Exploration is beautiful.

But if the mind never pauses, it never gathers the treasure. It just keeps wandering deeper into the forest of ideas, admiring every tree.

So now I do something simple.

I press the brake and ask:

“What is the intention here?”

Because intention is the mother of direction.

And hidden among all those connections are real gems.

Ideas worth shaping.
Insights worth sharing.

And here is the clue I’ve learned to watch for:

When I feel stuck, it’s almost never because I’m not doing enough.

It’s usually the opposite.

I’ve been doing too much.
Following too many ideas.
Chasing too many threads from an overactive mind.

Even birds need to land sometimes.