Scatterbrained, indeed. Flit from one of today's little work problems to one of last week's big family problems to familiar regret about an opportunity missed two years ago to concern about a deadline coming up next week to a bit of worry about a favorite tooth cavity, and so on and so on.

Is that really thinking? Aren't we just re-re-processing mostly old stuff that we've gone over again and again? In a way, it is non-thinking thinking, isn't it?

The so-called stream of consciousness is at best a stream of semi-consciousness.

Perhaps we need to speak of momentum. This habitual non-thinking has its own momentum, its own on-going force. Whatever it is in our mind that does this, it really likes to do it. And it really wants to keep on doing it.

There's another momentum, in addition to these little non-thinking thought habits we've developed through our life. There's also an far older, larger momentum that we've picked up over the millennia of evolution. We're inheritors of minds which have developed a seemingly successful coping mechanism which we call rational thought and which in its simplest form consists of taking in information, weighing it, and arriving at a decision.

That's the nice way to put it. What it means is, we are genetically a bunch of compulsive worrywarts. Our very evolutionary history teaches us (without saying a word) that it is foolhardy and dangerous to stop worrying. So we also have all that momentum keeping us in the Big Rut.

To change this mental behavior is like a tiny tugboat nudging up against the bow of a massive ship. To turn the ship, the small tug can apply just a small pressure, but the turn takes time, perhaps quite a long time, and is so slow that at first there is no apparent effect.

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