I had a play date with the abuser mind. I have a play date with the abuser mind every day. That’s a regular thing – nothing new there. Just me and the good old abuser mind – that’s a fun proposition, isn’t it? The jolly old abuser mind and me – what a bleeding laugh that is. The good old abuser mind. Where would we be, huh? Where would we be? I’m happy enough when things happen as they should do – I am as cheerful and light-hearted as the next man – but the thing is though that they never do happen that way. I can’t understand it but they just never do. That’s no fault of mine though and I think it’s very unfair the way everyone says I’m such a crabby, cranky old bastard. I never get a chance to be my natural good-natured happy-go-lucky self and that’s no fault of mine…

Just me and the abuser mind, squaring off. Only we’re not squaring off – I’m not, anyway. I’m trying my best to run away, as I always do. Run, run, run from the abuser mind, as the old children’s rhyme goes. Run from the horrible old abuser mind only you can’t because it’s in your head. Run, run, run. Run as fast as you can. But how can you get away? It’s just me and the abuser mind, sharing the same head. The two of us – alone at last. Spending quality time, as you do… The abuser mind has never got a good word for me, you know that? Never even a single good word. Never a good word, never a good word. That rotten old abuser mind loves to abuse me and make me feel small, as you might imagine.

I obliged the abuser mind in this matter as much as I could – I felt as small as small could be. I couldn’t get any smaller. I grovelled. This merely served to enrage the abuser mind still further however. The abuser mind was beside itself with rage. It was incandescent with rage. I cowered in the corner. What else could I do? Cowering was my preferred strategy; it was my strategy of choice. I learned it in cowering school. I learned it on an online course on self-development run by a very famous life coach. Cowering will always confuse your enemy, he told us. He won’t know what to do and – if you are lucky – he will be so disgusted with you that he will go off and leave you alone. With any luck your enemy will be so nauseated by your lack of spirit that he will stop persecuting you. That doesn’t work with the abuser mind though, as I have since discovered to my cost. Cowering is still my strategy of choice however – I still hold onto the hope that it might one day work for me.

Why does the abuser mind hate and despise me so much, I often wonder? What has it got against me? I never did it any harm, after all. What would I have to do in order for the abuser mind to like me? It doesn’t work that way though, as I am only slowly coming to realise. I’ve given up ways trying to find ways to get the abuser mind to like me – instead, I just try to make myself as small as it is possible to be so that will no longer notice me. I’m trying to shrink away to nothing. This enrages the abuser mind the same as everything else that I do does, of course. ‘Where are you, you little bastard,’ it roars, ‘show me yourself so I can abuse you as you deserve’….

I had excelled myself in becoming small. I had become as small as one of those little red spider mites that scurry around in the gaps between the paving slabs in the garden on a hot summer’s day. Scurrying along, scurrying along, without a care in the world. It didn’t last for long but for a brief while there I knew peace. What words are possible to describe how I felt, or rather how that peace felt? That sense of peace was alien to me; it was something that had never been part of my life. I scurried and scurried and scurried and did nothing else but scurry and the whole time there was never even a single thought in my head! The whole time there was no thinking whatsoever. No thinking, only carefree scurrying. I had never felt so good in my entire life.

That was my discovery of ‘inner peace’, I suppose you could say. It wasn’t really ‘inner’ peace though – that’s a common misnomer. It’s really outer peace that gets inside you, that’s what it is. It’s external peace that gets inside you like a mustard seed and then expands infinitely. It blows up inside you like a silent explosion – like an explosion of peace. It’s a moment of quietness that lasts forever. Let’s put it like that. Let’s express it like that. The moment lasts forever it’s true, but all the same it’s gone now. It’s a memory and like all memories it is false. What it did show me however is the utter fantastical futility of all my striving. It showed me the insane stupidity of all my frantic non-stop striving and grasping. I can’t stop of course.  I am absolutely powerless to stop but the difference is that I am now haunted by that memory of blissful thoughtlessness when I was a very tiny red spider mite. I am haunted by the memory of that brief magical period of thoughtlessness which I experienced when I inadvertently broke through the sub-atomic dimensional barrier and made myself very small indeed. I’m still frantically striving of course but the difference now is that I know that what I’m striving for has no meaning. I am consciously experiencing the insane futility of my own life, if that makes any sense to you. Which of course it might not…