And yet equally as obstacle-ridden, of the kind you supposed to run up to and jump over, except you run and stop. Stock-still as if someone's shouted “Freeze!”, without the Hands Up or Put Your Hands Where I Can See Them because it's not an arrest, citizen's or police, and nor is a crime in the process of being committed.
Perhaps listening to and acting on your inner voice is a sort of crime though? A crime of thought, though I don't think George Orwell meant this type, where it prevents you, and only you, from following through on something. Nothing you set your heart on, though possibly it would be easier if you had, because then, somehow, the heart overrules everything, but when it doesn't, well, there's hell to pay.
The mind will think on and on and on...until the matter's settled. Never giving it a rest even if you, as a last resort, resort to begging. And makes it its mission in turn to upset other organs: heart, stomach, liver. The more you try to prevent the mind from focusing on the dilemma the more it will, which attracts the very thing you're trying to avoid. The whole enterprise to not do so (and jinx a positive outcome) a waste of time, and which then occurs after it has made you a bag of jangled nerves and an emotional wreck to further prolong the agony.
I wonder do only sensitive and analytical personalities think along these lines? And do some people's brains talk to them too much? As if there's been an interruption of electricity, where immoderate sparks upset the functions of organs and intercepts important messages; or distorts any internal symbiotic communication until a decision, that can't be retracted without a lot of humiliation, has been made.
Of course, there's stubbornness too, which tends to throw a further spanner in the works if it's the rigid type. Is there any other form? Yes, like everything there's a scale to be slid up or down, almost (and yet nothing like) like a highly polished and particularly attractive bannister. Mind you have a cushion at the end though because there's only ever one direction in which you can go with that. Down, down down...but then if you have recurring moments of that sort you'll be familiar with it; though it has to be said when you land, if you land instead of clinging and pulling yourself back up, there's more of a bruising bump, where you may not be able to sit down comfortably for days. But be thankful, if you can, it wasn't your head. Hmm, if however you have been in a sticky frame of mind, you might, of course, have preferred that it was. Well, as mentioned before, we never get what we wish for. And nobody, really, truthfully, wants to be a Humpty Dumpty character: put together again and wrapped up in bandages, or even cotton wool to prevent such mishaps in future.
But could physical ills obliterate the ills of the mind? Provide respite when the mind's overwrought, and been in that state for a while? Well, who can say with any authority, as that as they say is also 'all in the mind', your individual brain and perception of events, which may not be altogether true. Nobody's version of reality (or of their-self) ever is. There's nothing we, humans, can do about that, except be sensitive to such fluctuations: in perception, in mood, in analysis. That's our trouble, in work, in life, we try to pin ourselves down to one thing or many things, one or many labels, when all is fluid around us and constantly on the move or changing, and when nothing needs, or wants, to be defined.
For God's sake, just BE! Tough that, when it can be misinterpreted as flakiness or perpetual ungratefulness, and is neither. Instead, it's a state that doesn't assume anything, that allows choice regardless of how something went, that accepts what is reasonable to one may not be reasonable to another, and where any stubbornness displayed is in fact a deep dislike of, an inner recoil from, anything that appears would only serve a conflictual nature.
Picture credit: Feminine Folly, 1819-1824, Francisco Goya (Source: WikiArt.org).
All posts published this year were penned during the last.
