Crowded thinking is like a closet. You have crammed too much into your mind. You don't want to give up anything. You want to keep it all in case.

And so your mind is crammed with isolated thoughts that you have no use for but want to keep in case you do. Grudges are kept there. Every mistake you ever made. Every insult you ever had handed to you.

Your hands grope in the closet and you come upon things you had forgotten all about. Some or many you would be better off without. But it is hard for you to part with thoughts, even useless ones.

It is as if you think your thoughts are strings that connect one to the other and you to eternity. Or your thoughts are strung across a long clothesline. You may not have quite noticed that accumulated thoughts make the clothesline sag.

Who keeps all these vagrant thoughts in your mind? Who put them there? Who can go past them?

You do not keep all the clothes you once wore that no longer fit you. You certainly don't keep all your childhood clothes, and yet how fervently you pack all the worn-out thoughts from long ago and won't let them go.

You have had thoughts that fit into a certain groove. Even if the thoughts slump, you are comfortable lying on them. You resist emptying them and starting a new pattern.

What has served its usefulness has served its usefulness.

Dishes with cracks are best thrown out.

Thoughts, no matter what their condition, seem to be kept indefinitely. Some are restored. Some are in mothballs.

Although you will admit that thoughts come and go, you believe you are supposed to keep them all framed on your mantel.

Perhaps it is fitting to start a new family of thoughts. Maybe old thinking has to be undone. Recycled. Thrown out.

How many old thoughts do you need?

How many must you keep and rehash and rehash?

Consider that you are entering a palace. In the front hall, you take off old thoughts. There is a basket on the left to drop them in. Another basket on the right has new thoughts for you to pick up. You have your choices. There is a list posted, and you take a few.

Or you make your own list. What would you like to be thinking about? What thoughts would you savor?

Tell Me, how many thoughts do you have to have? Do they mellow like good wine or beer in a cask? Sometimes you have to throw the old dregs out and start over.

Those repeated thoughts that you hold fast to have clung to you. Let them be the first to go. They have kept you imprisoned. Have you not been cooped up in your thoughts? Free yourself from fomenting stale overworked thoughts. Say goodbye to them. Let them go. They have visited you long enough.

Worn-out thinking does not serve you well. It wears you out. Old patterns do not fit you any longer. They may never have been right for you. That thoughts have stood the test of time does not attest to their value. Some of your oldest thoughts are the least useful.

How do some of these old thoughts make you feel? They may be antiques handed down to you from generation to generation. They may never have been valuable. Perhaps they were mindlessly passed down and, mindlessly, you took them and pressed them like flowers for preservation.

Press your hand to your heart now and give old patterns and heartaches a chance to leave. Shoo them out. Beckon new ones in.