I recently made a trip to New Zealand, where I spent most of my life and where my family lives. On my last night in Christchurch, my mother took the family out for dinner at an Indian restaurant. We took off our coats, sat down and picked up the menus; a flat three minutes later, we’d all ordered what we wanted and the cooking was underway.

I was reminded yet again of one of the tiny but telling differences between New Zealand and the United States, and forgive me the generalization – Kiwi restaurant menus take up a maximum of two pages and pretty much offer you one of each possibility. American menus go on forever and offer multiple permutations of every food item in the kitchen.

Even then, Americans relish and lavishly use their substitution privilege, and will often choose to change the components of a dish to the point that it’s unrecognizable. The process of ordering involves endless to-and-fro with the waitperson, who often has to shuffle off to the kitchen several times to check, for example, into what shape the radish garnish has been cut, or whether it’s possible to remove the hazelnuts from the dukkah (hint: it’s not). Not gonna lie, this drives me a bit nuts. We’re sitting down, we’re hungry – let’s get to it.

It strikes me that the way we humans tend to think is not dissimilar to the Kiwi approach to a menu, and the way we might want to approach our thinking is closer to the US version (without the angsty preciousness).

The conventional wisdom in the thoughts-and-prayers world holds that if you find yourself thinking a “negative” thought, one that causes you pain, you should do what it takes to convert it to a less negative one – perhaps you’ll dissolve that thought, perhaps you’ll distract yourself, perhaps you’ll think about what you could do that might cheer you up. These things can work to an extent.

When we focus, however, on switching one thought for another, we can get caught in what I call a cognitive impasse: we are still counting on and relying on thought to help us change, make decisions, and move forward. And, not only thought, but old thought, because all we have to choose from is thoughts we’ve thought before. It’s as if, when we rely on our personal minds for a new, improved thought, our choices are limited by the possibilities we’ve already – previously – allowed for.

We believe we’re choosing new thoughts, but we’re really just scanning the range of already-created thoughts to find a new perspective.

So, as with the New Zealand menu, despite what we may want – and despite the potential of the chef to create hitherto-unimagined wonders – the choices are what they are. No substitutions, no flights of fancy, thank you.

It seems to me there’s a better way. All the above comes from circling endlessly in the morass of our familiar ideas, our habitual experiences. We can actually go beyond, or, more correctly, back, to a place before thought, to where all is still possibility, to what we haven’t thought of yet. We limit ourselves to what is already known, and still, it’s thinking.

It’s our hearts, the intelligence of life, what we might call the “big mind”, that makes the difference.

There, we go beyond thought, or, put another way, to a place before thought – before we think, and attach to, the thoughts that create our experience.

So (to labor the metaphor beyond what it can actually bear) it’s as if you walk into an American restaurant with an open mind about what you want and, regardless of what’s on the menu, use the limitless creativity of your own consciousness to create a delicious and satisfying new dish, every day and in every moment.