Your clever, difficult brain. Can a gift also be a nightmare?

Sometimes a gift is also a nightmare.
Take the human brain, for instance.
It’s one of the human races’ most remarkable achievements: the ability to think about something that is not actually happening.
Amazing.
It’s a cognitive triumph… but one that comes at great emotional cost; because it’s a gift we find very difficult to control.
You’ll know what happens.
Unwelcome thoughts or feelings can arrive and change our mood instantly, taking away our peace.
Perhaps we re-live a painful memory from our past, one when we were hurt; or get caught up with an anxiety about the future.
These things aren’t actually happening, but they might as well be; they’ve managed to kidnap us with consequences for our mood.
From a state of happiness we become negative towards ourselves or others; feel despair, unable to cope; trapped in rigid and obsessional thought processes, worried or exhausted.
Ultimately, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, hooking up with the unreal and problematic whilst removing us from the present where we have power.
By noticing what is arising inside me; by deepening my breathing; by going for a walk/cycle ride/swim/run; by allowing but not bowing to any thought or feeling passing through me, I begin my journey back to the present…
…where free of past and future kidnappers, I can decide who and what I will be.
Arriving at the present is the real gift.