The World Is Too Much with Me
When Buddhists speak of the monkey mind, they are referring to the chatter in our heads that keeps us in the past or ahead in the future with constant thinking. All that chattering blocks being mindfully in the present.
My head has a troop of monkeys.
I’ve always been an over thinker, but it’s been even worse lately in spite of my best efforts. I’m doing my usual: meditation, writing, exercise, etc. It’s not enough.
Fortunately, there is more to try in an effort to calm those monkeys. For me, nature brings a sense of peace, and when I can’t get out in nature, there is William Wordsworth.
Wordsworth (1770–1850) was part of the Romantic movement in literature. The Romantics, especially Wordsworth, emphasized how being in nature could be a spiritual and healing experience.
I’ve been using the title of one of Wordsworth’s poems, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” as a reminder when I get caught by those monkeys, that is my constant mind chatter.
Wordsworth wrote “The World Is Too Much with Us” early in the nineteenth century. The title comes from the first line: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;” in other words, we’re so caught up in earning money, only to spend it as a way of finding fulfillment, that we are missing out on our true ability to be happy: being in the present moment.
Wordsworth continues, “Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Wordsworth is not saying, of course, that we fail to recognize that we own nature in any way. Rather, by concentrating on materialism, we lose our sense of connection to nature and its ability to nurture us. We lose our ability to feel the healing power of all that is beautiful around us, and it’s a bad deal.
My mind monkeys have been obsessed with my work situation, and it’s been stealing my inner peace. When they haven’t been chattering away about work, they are pointing to headlines that rob me of peace of mind.
As Wordsworth aged, he was accused by younger writers of the Romantic movement of selling out and not being engaged politically. What good were nature poems in the face of social injustice?
But Wordsworth understood that if he didn’t feel that healing connection to nature that the negativity of all that was happening in the world (and these Romantics were living in very tumultuous times) would lead him to lose heart, unable to devote any energy to positive change.
No real change can come if we have no heart.
Nature — and, hey, poetry about nature — can hush the monkeys for a bit, allowing some peace and quiet that I know I desperately need as I face the challenges ahead.
When the world is too much with me, I’m going to pause, enjoy the beauty all around me, catch my breath, and quiet my monkey mind so that I can hear the birds sing at sunrise.
I’ll visit the beach before I go once more unto the breach.
