“Beat
me! Beat me!” cried the masochist.
“No!”
replied the sadist.
Don’t
ask where that came from. Like a disproportionately high percentage of my thoughts, I
couldn’t tell you. I wasn’t thinking of masochism or sadism (who
does?). It was just there. It seems that whenever I’m not really
concentrating on something specific, like brushing my teeth or
writing a book, I have very little control over where my mind goes,
or why.
I’ve
often said I write these blogs to demonstrate that you and I have a
lot more in common than you might think. And yet perhaps I’m
deluding myself. Maybe it’s just my attempt to not feel quite so
isolated from the rest of humanity as I sometimes do. I can’t
imagine that your mind can be quite so chaotic. I always picture
everyone else (which of course includes you) as being in far more
control of their minds and their lives than I, and find evidence of
that fact just about everywhere.
To
everyone else—to you, as I imagine you—, the mind is a
smooth-running machine: thought A to thought B to thought C. To me,
it’s a vast pin-ball machine with me being the little silver ball
caroming wildly from one thing to another.
I
truly admire those people…no doubt you’re one of them…with
almost total control over their minds and their lives; who see an
objective at a distance of a year, a day, or an hour, and march
straight toward it, totally undeterred by the maelstrom of
distractions I find endlessly swirling about me.
I
pass people on the street and look at them and know they are not
like me. I can clearly see that they
know what to do in any given situation. They
never make stupid mistakes, or say stupid things they wish they
hadn’t. They
never
get upset by petty or silly things. They
have controlled minds, and part of me envies them for it, and part
of me is terrified by the idea.
I
suspect I associate a controlled mind with a lack of freedom. As
annoying as my mental pin-ball game may occasionally be, I also
delight in its randomness; in the constant surprises it provides.
The
problem is that each of us goes through life locked within ourselves,
filtering everything through our own experiences, and reacting
according to them because we can only observe others. We cannot be
them. We live among five billion other people, yet only have one true
point of reference—our own. And we almost never stop to realize
that each one of those five billion is also living individually
within themselves. So all five billion of us assumes that it is a
matter of “me” being here and everyone else being there, sharing
some secret bonds “me” cannot understand.
The
lack of a controlled mind is one of the reasons this particular “me”
gets so little constructive done. I seem incapable of preventing my
mind from coming up with out-of-nowhere thoughts. (A case in point:
my mind just flashed to a stack of celebrity rag magazines I had the
misfortune to thumb through at my part time job, and set me to
wondering how or why actresses and models …female
models…seem to think that posing with one hand on a hip makes them
irresistibly sexy/seductive? Surely there must be a reason, or they
wouldn’t do it. A man posed like that would be considered…well,
you know. It must be one of those “you’ve got to be straight to
understand” things. There are a lot of those.) And, to quote Linda
Ellerbee, so it goes.
So,
since you have a controlled mind and I do not, I guess we’re not as
much alike as I thought.
Or
are we?
Dorien's
blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday. Please take a moment to visit his website
(http://www.doriengrey.com)
and, if you enjoy these blogs, you might want to check out Short
Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1).
2 comments:
Some of the fun of life is doing those silly things. I've pulled so much out of my own life that I've done and added it to my writing. And, oddly enough, people have related to it.
So, yes, we're very much alike.
We're alot moe alike than you imagine. I can relate to this post perfectly.
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