Owned.

I have been lost to the idea of contemplation. The point in cognition where you're thinking about thinking - about every idea that's passed the realms of putting thoughts into their particular place. I've been categorizing and making sense of what I can, while hitting the "delete" button on the rest. Thing is, I realize that the mental trash bin hasn't been emptied. I thought that there might be some funky happenstance occurring that I hadn't yet accepted. That maybe there was a glitch in the wiring that wasn't allowing me to fully rid myself of these pesky little thoughts. They encompassed all those included in the "what if", "may possibly be" and "would have, could have, should have" category...the "But..." situations.

At some instance in that realm, it occurred to me that it's all about what we choose to keep ownership of. What we accept as our own when it comes from the outside in. I think that we're highly sensitive-beings and more often than not, the influences of our environments bombard our beings with feeling and we process those feelings against what we think we already know. Against what portions of experience we have chosen to keep as our reference manual.
For instance: It has been said, thought and determined among the governing authorities that the placement of children on sleeping bags for an overnight stay with their grandparents, all in one room -- is unacceptable. The punishment was governed by authorities who referenced some arbitrary set of something-or-others and the Nay-Sayers extended me a feeling that I'd done something wrong. And for whatever reason, I've chosen to live with that feeling for almost two years now. Until...I see the local news present (because of the single-digit weather that's hit our part of the state in the last week) that the homeless shelters are above their capacity. People are coming in droves to find a warm place to sleep and some food to eat. The camera-man pans over the crowd, who seem mildly delighted that they've been offered such a refuge and then I see it...a gymnasium floor covered with 2-inch thick mats for sleeping on; a wool blanket atop.
"That's it?!" I think. That government-funded, grant-accepting homeless shelter is providing beds and meals to persons (which, by the way, I completely agree with) and the "bed" as it would be, consists of little more than a mat on the floor?
"And I've chosen to keep lugging around this feeling of inadequacy because some person on a power-trip and in a so-called capacity to 'judge' has suggested that I acted unlawfully by having my children sleep in a sleeping bag, one room and during a visit to their grandparents'?"

Here I'd been searching for the next thought process that might offer liberation - and the issue of liberation has been to simply disregard and drop those "thoughts" as they occur. They are no longer owned by me as I'm choosing to disregard their existence and pertinence.