Imagine a world in which everything you think is broadcast over a speaker for everyone around you to hear. Some new technology that somehow reads your thoughts and announces them out loud.
I suspect it wouldn’t take long before most of us became a little embarrassed.
Not because our thoughts are necessarily terrible, but because we would suddenly hear how repetitive, exaggerated, contradictory, and sometimes downright absurd they can be. A mistake at work becomes unemployment. Unemployment becomes homelessness. A conversation from three days ago gets replayed with five different endings and several better things I should have said. Something that hasn’t happened—and probably never will—is carefully rehearsed as though it were already underway.
If all of that were coming through a speaker, I might eventually stop and think, What in the world am I listening to?
But because the conversation happens silently inside my own head, I often don’t question it at all.
I just join in.
The phrase sitting this one out reminds me of growing up around ball fields. Sitting out meant exactly what it sounds like: I wasn’t in the game. Maybe the coach had taken me out. Maybe I was tired, sick, bored, or simply wasn’t playing very well.
Whatever the reason, sitting out didn’t feel like something a kid wanted to do. It felt a little like weakness or failure.
I wanted to be in the game.
I wanted to play. I wanted to show how athletic and tough I was. I wanted the opportunity to make the great play—the kind of thing legends are made of, at least in the imagination of a kid sitting in a dugout.
As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve begun to appreciate sitting out a little more.
Sometimes I see young mothers and fathers chasing children through a store, trying to keep track of everyone and everything, and it looks exhausting. I remember doing those things myself. I just don’t have much desire to do them now.
A few years ago, I found myself sitting in the stands at a racetrack in a rural town about forty miles north of me on the Fourth of July. The town was known for its celebration and especially for the races.
I watched cars fly around a short track. These were amateur drivers, but they were serious racers. There were sprint cars, muscle cars, crashes and pileups. At times a car would become disabled and a driver would crawl through the window and hurry toward safety while everything continued around him.
I remember feeling anxious just watching it.
But I was watching it.
I wasn’t driving one of those cars.
I was sitting in the stands.
Years ago, through a family connection, I was also invited to observe a hip replacement surgery. I had imagined surgery as something almost delicate and mysterious. Instead, parts of it reminded me more of working on an engine. There were tools, hammers, screws, replacement parts, and a great deal of very physical work.
I stood off to the side of the operating table and watched the whole thing unfold.
It was fascinating.
Again, I was close enough to see everything, but I wasn’t the one doing the surgery. I wasn’t the patient. I wasn’t responsible for what happened next.
I was on the sidelines.
Some of the photographs that fascinate me most are images of Earth taken from satellites or spacecraft. From that distance the planet looks almost impossibly peaceful.
Yet somewhere down there are thunderstorms. Hurricanes. Traffic jams. Arguments. Hospitals. Deadlines. People losing jobs and people starting new ones. Babies being born. Someone sitting alone worrying about something that may never happen.
From the ground, any one of those things can feel like the entire world.
From above, you see that it is happening within something much larger.
The problem is that in my own life I rarely feel as though I am watching from above.
I feel like I am always in the game.
If it isn’t work, it is family. If it isn’t family, it is health, time, money, relationships, or some decision that needs to be made. I can lie awake at night unable to shut my mind off.
It keeps playing.
And I keep playing along with it.
A mistake at work isn’t simply a mistake. My mind can turn it into losing my job, losing my income, losing my home, and somehow arriving at a disaster that hasn’t even begun.
A relationship can occupy my thoughts for hours.
I can replay a conversation again and again, changing the ending each time.
I should have said this.
Why did they say that?
Next time I’ll say this.
And the strange thing is that none of this requires anything to actually be happening.
It can be Saturday afternoon. I can be sitting alone in my house watching television with absolutely nothing demanding my attention.
Yet inside, the conversation continues.
Replaying.
Rehearsing.
Predicting.
Defending.
Worrying.
Imagine again that speaker broadcasting all of it into the room.
I think hearing my thoughts that way might reveal something important.
A great deal of what passes through my mind doesn’t require a response.
Some of it doesn’t even make much sense.
Yet because the thought appears inside my own head, I tend to assume I need to climb into it and go wherever it wants to take me.
Maybe I don’t.
Maybe this is where sitting out becomes useful.
I don’t necessarily have to stop the thoughts. I don’t know that I could even if I tried.
But perhaps I can notice them.
There is that work story again.
There is that conversation again.
There is the future catastrophe again.
And instead of getting onto the field every time the ball is put in play, I can sometimes remain in the stands.
The game can continue without me.
The cars can circle the track without my climbing into one.
The storm can move across the Earth without becoming the entire Earth.
This doesn’t mean ignoring real problems or refusing to participate in life. There are things that need our attention. There are conversations we need to have, decisions we need to make, mistakes we need to correct, and responsibilities we need to carry.
But not every thought is a responsibility.
Not every fear is a prediction.
Not every imaginary conversation needs another rehearsal.
And not every thought deserves a place in the game.
Sometimes I can simply notice what is happening inside me and say:
I’m sitting this one out.
Perhaps peace doesn’t always come from quieting the mind.
Perhaps sometimes it comes from realizing that I don’t have to follow it everywhere it wants to go.