(Please pardon me if this one isn't entirely clear, for reasons that will be evident in a moment.)
I've been diligently practicing meditation recently. Where I would have missed days previously, lately I've meditated without fail before sleeping if I hadn't done it earlier. I do my end-of-day cooldown every day, even if I feel rather exhausted.
This end-of-day meditating is interesting, because it has me meditating in modes I previously wouldn't. I would've said, before, "I'm too tired right now..." -- maybe not consciously, but that would have been the subtext.
So tonight I'm having a very-tired-meditation.
And I noticed, sometimes thoughts spin up in entire chains linked together.
This must be happening all the time, but being dull and fatigued meant it was like my mind was working more slowly. I was able to recognize it tonight.
In basic mindfulness meditation, you focus on something. If your focus wanders, you re-focus.
I just focus on my breath and pay attention to that. Brian Sharp does a fine job of explaining it in his recent "Don't Look Away" talk at PAX.
Inevitably, your thought goes away from your breath. And you keep bringing it back there.
Tonight, I realized for the first time the chain of thoughts that spins up together. It was fascinating. It's like, when I was off the rails and was not focused on my breathing but rather thinking, it was because one thought seemed to trigger the next thought.
The most surreal moment came when I was checking my iPhone to see how much time was left in the meditation. I became aware at the thought underlying a near-automatic chain of thought of action. I was typing my password into my iPhone's lock screen slowly, and thinking even while I did it, "This is odd, I'm supposed to be meditating, not checking how much time is left." That thought came two clicks in to my four-click password. And I still, somehow, completed the four clicks, registered how much time was on the clock with my eyes, and then re-locked the phone -- all habitually -- before settling back in to meditate (for 49 more seconds).
Plenty of others have written about this before. It's not all so groundbreaking. But it was fascinating for me to see. It makes me strongly suspect that the neurotic click-click-click of online procrastination is of the same stuff, a spun-up chain of thoughts cascading into each other until broken by the external environment -- or interrupted and re-focused elsewhere due to one's own mindfulness.