Calming the Anxious Mind

A sorting sort of meditation

Julie Borden
2 min readJan 1, 2024
Photo by author

It all started with one package of beads. Primary colors. It might have been five hundred. Maybe a thousand. It was an impulse purchase. I didn’t want to string them. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with them; I just liked them.

Once they arrived I went and got a jar, and layered them by color, rainbow style. I enjoyed the process, the soft clicking between my fingers. And they were pretty to look at.

I didn’t take a picture of that first, fateful jar.

But I did buy more beads. And more. And more. More colors, more jars, more combinations. It was the process that I loved. Sorting is soothing to the mind, a kind of meditation, I realized.

photo by author

The point was always to dump them back out and sort them again a different way. But each combo was worth remembering. I mean look at all the colors! The smooth, glossy ones. The sparkly ones. The iridescent ones.

photo by author

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Julie Borden

Social worker, therapist, reader, writer, head-in-the-clouds dreamer, awed by most everything. (She/her) Reach me at JulieBordenLCSW@gmail.com.