i have always wondered where thoughts go once they have passed from my conscious. once i have been distracted by other such thoughts or once i have followed the Thread started by that thought, a thread that morphs and morphs until nothing of the original thought that created it remains. and what of those persistent, played-on-a-loop thoughts that keep returning to my head with a stubbornness akin to a fly that will sit nowhere else but on my face? do they take me on the same mental paths that i have walked on earlier, or do they end up creating new paths that lead me further into a complex maze? 

reason tells me that thoughts are nothing more than starting points for reflection, and in some cases action, that once followed through to their action-driven conclusions should disappear from the landscape of my consciousness. but they don’t.

it makes me wonder if an unexpressed, unexplored thought is a debit from the fullness of our lives, that by engaging ourselves in mental debates that don’t let thoughts pass out of our heads, we end up subtracting from the joie de vivre that we are entitled to.