Made up

I woke from a dream this morning and realised something. Not for the first time, but this time I saw it more clearly than I had before.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll remember being a kid in the garden, or the park, somewhere outdoors with your friends. A friendly game of football, maybe. And you’d bags being your favourite player. Straight away the game changed. You weren’t just kicking a ball about any more – you could hear the roar of the crowd, smell the grass at your team’s home ground, you were somewhere else entirely.

It felt real. While you were playing, you believed you were that person, you had their skill, their physical prowess, all of it. I remember it well. Sometimes I was Stefan Edberg, playing out some imagined tennis final. Other times I was Ayrton Senna, racing my BMX down the track – yes, a completely different sport, different speeds, different stakes, but I was reaching for that same single-minded focus he was known for, trying to find it in myself to go faster.

So where did all that come from? That realer-than-real sense that you actually were that person?

The answer – so simple that we often don’t even realise it’s happening – is that your thinking was creating the whole experience. And it was so good at it that you just fell into the feeling. You weren’t pretending to believe it – you believed it.

Which gets me thinking about today. How did you feel? Energised, or drained? Maybe there was a meeting you were dreading and you felt off before you’d even stepped into the room. Or you thought about a row you’d had recently and immediately broke out in a sweat at just the thought of it. Or maybe you booked your dream holiday, or got the keys to a new car. How did that feel?

I’d bet you went through all sorts today – things that haven’t happened yet, or things that already have – and at no point could you really tell whether what you were feeling was “real” or not. Here’s the thing, though. None of it was any more real than pretending to be Kenny Dalglish in the back garden. It was made up the exact same way.

What I’ve noticed, more and more, is that once you recognise where a feeling has actually come from, it gets easier to let it pass through rather than grab hold of it. Easier not to get hoodwinked into thinking something real is happening to you right there in the moment, when actually it’s just thinking, doing what it’s very good at doing.

I don’t think it’s something you can switch off. You’ll always be feeling something. But maybe, and I’m still working this out, there’s a difference between being swept along by whatever turns up, and getting some kind of say in when you feel what.