Ruminating isn’t just for cows anymore

I just learned the name of one of my personal demons.

It’s ‘Rumination.’

(The other demon’s name is Peanut M&Ms.)

Rumination, according to the experts at Wikipedia, is the psychological term for dwelling obsessively on the causes and consequences of something that has distressed you. Note that it is not the same as worry, which is about the future. Rumination is about the past.  However, you can have both rumination and worry, and that makes anxiety, which is absolutely about the present.

(Whew! For a moment there, I was worried. But now I know I’m good – I’ve got all the tenses covered.)

I’m primarily interested in rumination because I thought ‘rumination’ was about how cows ate. They are ‘ruminants’ after all. So naturally, I thought ruminating was about chewing a cud, which is what cows do, and believe me, you don’t want to know the details of that specific process of digestion. Suffice it to say, it isn’t pretty.

Every time I think of a cow eating, in fact, my mind instantly flips back to a trip we took to a local orchard one fall. As we rode the wagon back into the apple trees, we passed a big cow on the other side of the orchard fence who was watching us ride by. This cow was chewing its cud so industriously, there were streams of…goo, for lack of a better word…coming out both sides of its mouth. It sort of looked like apple goo, but since we were there to pick apples, I kept that observation to myself.

Nevertheless, the cow ruminating was not attractive.

Now that I think of it, though, I guess ‘rumination’ is a very good term for what I do with obsessing over something that distressed me. I chew it up in my head. It dribbles out over everything else in my life. It’s not attractive.

Uhmmm.  Excuse me, but I think I need to ruminate about this.

Heck , I might as well get some Peanut M&Ms, too, while I’m at it…