Analyze This!

“I guess that is how it’s been for 26 years, but I have never really analyzed it,” she said.

“Well, that’s what I do.  I can’t help but analyze everything.  I am just curious now about what everyone else thinks about this,” I reply.

Sometimes I am genuinely vexed by others’ mental processing.  I have trouble understanding how everyone doesn’t analyze everything.

My brain jumps from “oh” to “how?” to “I wonder why?” for just about everything and anything.

I don’t always wish to know, nor do I even wish to care, but that is how my brain seems to process what is around me.  It automatically processes everything I see with a question mark.

Why do I do X?  Wonder why he does Y?  What does it mean that he/she does or says X, Y, or Z?  How does he see the world?  What must she be thinking about to do X?  What is that over there?  What is its purpose?  Wonder why it is there?  How does it work?  Why does it work that way instead of this way?

I seek to understand everything fully, even when I would prefer it not matter.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all.  Often, it doesn’t matter.

But I have to know more.

It is like a compulsion, really.  I ask how or why or what when I know I don’t care and do not need to know.

Analyzing behaviors, thoughts and feelings of my own in different situations and in different circumstances has served me well.  I have a better idea of why I do what I do and think and say what I do.

I value my analytical brain almost as much as I wish it would take a break and let me breathe.

It has helped me to develop compassion in situations where others’ might not.  It has helped me to have a vast and diverse knowledge base that I otherwise wouldn’t have.

It doesn’t always serve me well, however.  My brain doesn’t stop wondering about stuff.  I love to understand, but sometimes I seek to understand a process that simply bogs down my brain space with needless information.

It is then, I understand why my parents made up answers to what had to have been relentless questions when I was young.

It is then that I try to stop and breath.  I do not always need to understand stuff.  There can be some mystery to this life, after all.

Do you analyze?  Do you seek to learn the why’s of what is happening around you?  If not, do you “get” why someone else might feel compelled to do so?