“Uh oh, I’ve wandered off… she’s still talking… what’s she talking about?
I hope I figure it out before it’s my turn to say something.
I’ll just keep nodding until then.”

Minds wander, some more than others.

Maybe we yell at ourselves for this drifting of thought.
Maybe we “try harder”, furrowing our brow, searching for some iron-will to keep ourselves on track.

Or maybe we give up, excuse ourselves, or change topics.

Either way, these attempts can give up a creative power inherent to a wandering mind.

To learn how we can move from wandering to engaging, tune in to S01E46 – “Wait, What were you just talking about?”

For the latest episode, I thought I’d do something different. I recorded it naked. No wait, I didn’t do that.

Instead, I recorded it while sitting at the piano. It was my attempt to be a bit looser in thought, as I tend to be while sitting at the keys. Perhaps oddly, I’ve sometimes said that my first language is piano. My second language is English.

In this episode, S01E45 – At the Piano, I present an example of my own wandering mind in action. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the episode. Did it work? Does it not? At least wear a robe?

• Kourosh

Listen and subscribe to the Rhythms of Focus podcast:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Overcast

​My goodness, AI has become quite the thing. More than a flavor of the month, it’s found its way into so many of our apps and tools.

And clearly it can be powerful.

But the more powerful a tool, the more caution it requires.

In today’s episode at Rhythms of Focus (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), we’ll explore the concerns of AI for a wandering mind.

• Kourosh

​

In this particular ADHDino (non-affiliate link) comic, we see our hero defeated by “a thing at 5”.

They could seemingly engage any number of things before 5, but somehow cannot with this sudden mark on the clock.

What gives?

In today’s episode of Rhythms of Focus (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), we get into 4 fears that can disrupt the best laid plans of a wandering mind.

• Kourosh

• Kourosh

Decisions can weigh heavy.

Even seemingly small ones, like deciding what to order at a restaurant or making a small purchase, can weigh us down into seeming paralysis.

Meanwhile, large ones like considering a change of professions or a move can plague us, filling the crevices of our every day, again miring us in anxieties, fears, regrets and more.

Or as decisions remain undecided, they can easily create and sustain multiple waves and storms, exacerbating the scatter of a wandering mind…

How can we manage?

]]> https://www.kouroshdini.com/on-decision-indecision/feed/ 0 53551 https://www.kouroshdini.com/the-spirit-and-practice-of-care/ https://www.kouroshdini.com/the-spirit-and-practice-of-care/#respond Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:05:11 +0000 https://www.kouroshdini.com/?p=53567

I’m being pulled, every which way. I need to do the dishes, I need to do the laundry, I have to write the report – maybe I just need to rest.

If I tell others I can’t do this right now, they might tell me I don’t care enough. Well, do I not care enough? How do I know if I’m being selfish?

The Push/Pull of Caring

In our younger days, we may have turned in so-called sloppy work. Often some comment of not caring enough is applied somewhere along the way. Said enough times, we might wonder about this of ourselves. Maybe it’s true.

Wandering minds already have enough to struggle with. To stay on track we can create any number of guides, lists, markers, all these sorts of things that help us move forward.

But in the meantime, even with these in helping us, we often have to pull ourselves back from one thing after another. We move into one thing, we get distracted. We dive deep into another, we might have to fight to pull ourselves out. It can be terribly exhausting, and yet there are still things to do.

Wallowing in the Overwhelm of Caring

Do we not have enough willpower? Or is it that we don’t care enough? Even when we say, “I don’t care,” the fact that something entered our mind, even to negate it, means that something about it has our attention. In this way, caring is hardly some binary thing.

What is care?

What is it though? What is care? In one sense, well, it’s an emotion. We can even point at it neuroanatomically: pathways and transmitters, dendritic connections and the like. We can also see it as an emotion in the sense of that which brushes into consciousness. Whether gently in barely perceptible waves or in crushing impossible storms.

What I think is often missed in discussions about care is that it’s more than an emotion. Beyond that, it is this spirit and practice.

Harnessing the Power of Care

Care flows through, and with, emotion. Emanating from meaning in the stories of our lives into that of perception, thought, action — at the very least. Often, care can be this wonderful spirit around which we can organize ourselves; doing the things that we feel to be helpful to those around us.

Care involves a depth of attention on something. It’s the spirit that nourishes, that creates the bed of intuition, that tempers and guides strength, the force of mystery of a force at all. We care in considering, when we rest our minds in some experience, our interests, our intentions attuning to what is.

Ideally, we may even take our time. Find patience to reach some gentle acknowledgement where our decisions are deliberate. We can heighten that powerful measure of being. Agency itself.

When we care for others, when we care for ourselves, when we care for the emotions of play and curiosity and discovery within ourselves. We can often fly on this feeling of mastery, meaningful work, and meaningful relationships.

The Invisible Weight of Caring

But there can be a burden to caring. As a spirit, it’s eons old, an entity carried within and through us from the inception of whenever life began to care for life. Care is its own life, running deep within us. And as a spirit, it has its own needs. It draws resources from us. It takes our time, our attention, the materials of ourselves. And resources are limited. Caught within us.

Care can be pressed and pulled in many competing directions. Loved ones, ourselves, multiple others. Because of limits, we must make decisions and sometimes they are terribly difficult, sometimes at our sacrifice, sometimes at others, and often at both.

In losing sight of limits, we often then wonder whether we care enough, that we don’t care for everything then, and somehow because of that we are terrible.

It’s not the care itself that is limited, so much as it is the resources. In losing sight of these limits we then might wonder, do we care enough? And if we don’t, that somehow we’re terrible.

Often, this leads into a feeling of burden. We may even resent the feeling of care itself, sensing that burden. That sense itself, in turn, can feel selfish — touching off feelings of guilt and shame and more as care’s complexity grows.

Care Confused with Worry

Sometimes care is confused with worry. Worry, anxiety, these signals that something might be wrong, something’s amiss. Maybe something might happen in the future. There’s some risk for loss. We might then feel that in order to care, we have to exacerbate that feeling, indulge it, stir it, stoke it, fan the flames.

But this too becomes a path where we might exhaust ourselves into a sense of worry that we are uncaring, not just exhausted. Often, then that leads to some method of abusing ourselves, shaming ourselves, yelling at ourselves, accusing ourselves of being uncaring. Maybe that would help us care more, that would help us get the things done.

If we continue to use worry as our measure of care, we might try to bring risk to zero. Essentially attempting to rid ourselves of anxiety as the measure. But worry cannot be brought to zero. We not only exhaust ourselves, but risk crushing others. We smother.

Other Confusions of Care

Care may even be fused or confused with righteousness. This attempt to be good or moral then perverted into cruelty. Of course worry can relate to care. It’s a message of something that might be injured or lost. To the degree we can, perhaps an ideal, we can acknowledge that message and say, “Thank you, I’ll take it from here.”

Even here, we must be able to accept risk, limits, and mortality itself as an inevitability in order to care well. Even more maliciously, care can be hijacked by others who intend to manipulate. A weaponizing of vulnerability, an indulgence of victimhood to pull at the heartstrings.

Whether done consciously or unconsciously, we may end up sacrificing ourselves, perhaps inadvertently. Losing the path’s care we could have otherwise offered to others. In this way, care is not simply some unmitigated good. Care needs its own care.

And of course, as we care for ourselves, we can care better for others. Doing so, beyond spirit then, beyond emotion, care is a skill. And as a skill it can be practiced. Sometimes it’s simple. Putting on your mask before putting someone else’s on, is very much this practice.

Nurturing Our Care Practice

Care, also as the mother of consideration, of acknowledgement, as the holder of agency, can be practiced.  When we anchor ourselves considering the options of the moment. When we pause at the edge of action. When we pause to consider how to guide our momentum of the moment.

When we recognize the limits of our working memory. When we know and stand up for the limitations we’ve discovered. When we pay attention to our frustration and sense.

When we pay attention to our frustration and use it to help find the ease within it. To discover a way forward. When we clear and support paths for the development of things we find meaningful. When we recognize the limits of our lives, our days, and feel the pain in those limits without indulging them, without ignoring them.

We practice care.

I’d like to close with a comment that I’d read on Reddit. It goes like this:

“When I was younger, I had many dreams and complex purposes like getting rich, become a famous doctor, and things like that. By living life and having experiences, good ones and bad ones, job and relationships and life overall, I learned that a simple purpose made me happier than ever.

And that purpose is to care. Care for my family. Care for those in need, care for my dogs. Now I just care and that’s my purpose ’til the day I die.”

– Kourosh

“Don’t fear mistakes. There are none.”

– Miles Davis

I make mistakes. I’m convinced that no one can avoid making mistakes despite the authority with which Miles may make his claim.

Mistakes as a presence in art is undeniable.

The lesson as I understand it, is of learning and adapting to what is originally perceived as error so that it becomes a path towards mastery. I imagine that at least some of this concept bears truth in all endeavors.

But mistakes are not so simple…

There are mistakes, there are errors, and there are lessons.

An error only means a difference between what we thought could be and what became. We turn it into a lesson to the degree we can acknowledge it. We turn it into a mistake to the degree we ignore it.

If we are without error, it is only because we haven’t tried.

It is the grace with which we fumble, by which there are no mistakes.

• Kourosh

For a deeper dive into this excerpt, check out the podcast episode here.

The core of the issue is deeper than simple “just” starting. Otherwise, it would reliably work.

If we define motivation as the alignment of emotions with intention, we might then consider where and how that alignment occurs. The 8 gears of focus offers an ascending structure for that alignment. Briefly listed they are:

• Being
• Approach
• Consider
• Visit
• Begin
• Complete
• Schedule
• Perform

One end supports nurturing and caring. It is the foundation. At the other is an action of skill, a knowledge of depth, a presentation and connection to an audience of world or universe.

Each gear embedded within the next offers a framework to help understand the flow of emotion into action. When there is trouble in engaging, when we feel “I don’t wanna”, we can examine where in this hierarchy is the injury or kink in the line.

Of note, we often abuse ourselves with the higher gears. For example, “Just do the work already!”

When we return to the more foundational areas of frustration, anger, worry, fear, and more, we are in a better place to engage the deeper, more natural, meaningful flows into our world, work, and play.

For a deeper dive, ​check out the episode here​.

• Kourosh

PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, ​kindly leave a review​! It will help other wandering minds find it, too.

]]> https://www.kouroshdini.com/aligning-emotion-and-intention-with-the-8-gears-of-focus/feed/ 0 53530 https://www.kouroshdini.com/an-honor-guide/ https://www.kouroshdini.com/an-honor-guide/#respond Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:05:18 +0000 https://www.kouroshdini.com/?p=53526

I actually finished a project. But, there are a zillion more… Argh!

Organizing the day is not a simple matter.

Wandering minds in particular struggle with all of these.

Time-blindness, working memory troubles, injuries to agency, and a lack of trust between past, present, and future selves complicate matters to say the least.

One of the tools in the ​Waves of Focus​ methodology of engaging a wandering mind is called an Honor Guide.

The three main sections are:

• The Engaged – tracking my developing projects
• The Horizon – tracking a small handful of projects that I hope to reach next
• The Steady – tracking well established matters, holding them steady.

It seems simple. It is simple. But the practice is in developing the trust in the relationships between past, present, and future selves.

For a more detailed exploration, check out the ​Rhythms of Focus episode here​.

• Kourosh

Consider the extended podcast radio-mega remix version of today’s newsletter at Rhythms of Focus.

• Kourosh

_________________________

For some wandering minds, reading a book is about as difficult as climbing a mountain, mountaineers notwithstanding. Getting to the book at all is one hurdle, and staying with the book is yet another.

We might blame our wandering minds, or say, “I’m not a visual learner” Either might be true.

Sometimes if you’re like me, you might just fall asleep.

I’ll even go through waves of falling asleep, open the book, read another sentence, and I’m out again. But after a while, sometimes something clicks and I’m off and running.

As we read, I think there’s a formatting stage that isn’t often discussed. Especially when we’re first starting a book, new concepts are coming to mind.

For them to make any sense, we need to reflect, connecting things together. When our minds have this tendency to wander, the initial sensation of discovering, difference, and discrepancies isn’t always about wonder.

Instead, it’s about confusion. And because the birth of confusion is often unconscious, we don’t recognize what caused it. Confusion appears when something doesn’t make sense. Usually two or more things somehow don’t connect. Maybe this sentence and that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. And we just went by not realizing it. Maybe an idea just appearing seems to conflict with something Only vaguely remembered from this last page, last paragraph, last chapter.

Or maybe the words stir a set of associations, some thoughts and daydream. Something gets touched off within a recollection, A moment of sadness, joy, shame, excitement. The grocery item you just forgot.

Confusion can be this large billowing fog obstructing much of whatever it is that we would see. We daydream, maybe reading the same paragraph over and over.

Or we fall asleep. The wandering mind myopic and magnified it as it is and its views of the now are particularly susceptible to emotions, huge in swallowing as they can be.

So how do we regain ourselves? How do we engage and feel alive again?

Confusion is often a sign of disconnect, whether between concepts on the page or between the page and my own associations.

To bridge the disconnect, I often like to use the question:

Sometimes I discover a connection, and when I do, I’m often feeling alive again.

Sometimes I don’t find a connection. But having asked the question itself somehow helps contain that confusion.

Now, of course, this is not foolproof. Sometimes I still fall asleep. But I take solace in the idea that sleep can often be about formatting, about consolidation.

I’m bringing together of worlds of thought and idea between myself and another person. And the deeper the resonance into the unconscious worlds, the greater the mysteries of sleep are ready to do their work.

• Kourosh