The Monkey On My Mind

    I've always been one of those addle-brained people who have a hard time focusing and concentrating.  I don't always hear what I'm told the first time and I usually need to have instructions repeated.
     Unless I stop and repeat to myself my parking location before I enter a store,  I'll end up wandering cluelessly around the parking looking for my car afterwards.  I'm bad with directions.
    Though I love to read I'm not a partitularly good reader and sometimes have to read passages several times over before absorbing the gist. 
     Though I teach piano I'm a poor sight reader and the only way I can get through a piece of music is by identifying the chord patterns. 
     I'm by nature forgetful.  And disorganized.  And anxious. Whatever I'm doing, I feel like I should be doing something else. My mind is never clear, not even during yoga class when our teacher has told us to put our minds for the next hour between the last thought and the next thought.  How refreshing that would be, but I can't turn it off. 
    I'm always ruminating, figuring, or mentally re-writing some scene from my past with better dialogue and a better ending.  Yet I seldom come up with any productive thinking.
    When I was young I used to be a constant daydreamer, a mental meanderer, but my full-time daydreaming has  grown up into more high-speed cogitating.  Nowadays daydreaming is more my fall-back mode. 
    If I don't always come across this way in my daily work and social exchanges, it's because I've worked at learning memorization, organization and mental tricks that help me keep it all together most of the time.  But I've had to work at it.  More than most people, I think. And I have improved over time compared to when I was young.
    Subsequently I've always felt like there was something wrong with me, something keeping me from reaching my full potential. 
    Then I learned that the Buddhists have a term for my problem:  I've got a mind monkey.
    According to Wikipedia, a  mind monkey is "...a Buddhist term meaning
unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable."
    That's my mind.
    Author Daniel Smith in his book "Monkey Mind" described a crowd of monkeys constantly swinging across his mind hooting and throwing banana peels at each other.
    That's also my mind. 
    Is it by chance yours, too?
    Which begs the question:  What's with this mind monkey?  What's going on really?
    Though the diagnosis wasn't around in my day, I've wondered in recent years if I'm just plain old garden-variety ADHD. 
    But now I don't think I am.  I believe that my monkey has a different name.
    Tune in tomorrow...