HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

October 26th, 2018

Such a phrase is pinned to the passive dreamers.  Those who seem to do a lot of thinking, or day dreaming and not much action.

They might have a look as though they are far away, as though they imagine themselves in a different place from where their body is, often thinking of some kind of idyllic future, or nostalgic past.

The problem is quite the opposite from being far removed from one’s self.  Someone with their head in the clouds would be hard pressed to be more isolated from those clouds, the sky, and anything around them.  They are in fact buried within themselves, lost in a made-up story of their own making.  A narrative that can be increasingly fraught with inaccuracy when cut off from reality.  This is a kind of blindness, one that can be worse than the loss of eyesight, for it robs a person of the greatest gift we have: the present.

Being lost in thought isn’t much different from having one’s head in the clouds.  Such prolonged ‘thinking’ has almost no lasting effect unless we act on such thoughts or translate them in some way, through writing or some other medium.  Chances are high that all that thinking is just a waste of the present.

We’d do well to ask: how often do I have my head in the clouds?  How often am I lost in thought?

Nothing is more powerful than being present in the here and now.  The present is our only tool for shaping the future, but if we have our head in the clouds we relinquish that tool and we will fail to see that particular opportunity passing by that could make tomorrow look more like that vision we see in the clouds.