Tuesday, June 24, 2014

RULE NUMBER FIVE: THE MIND IS AN ASSHOLE

I think everyone knows this, but I felt like talking about it anyway. 
We have all experienced this over and over: the mind has the power to throw your entire life out of balance in just a few seconds. I can actually list out 20 things our minds do to us that annoy the living daylights out of ourselves.

The mind... 
1.       Keeps you awake when you’re sleepy
2.       Makes you sleepy when you should be awake (like at every client meeting)
3.       Makes you stupid when you should be smart (with the "love of your life", meeting the CEO of the company you work for, or when you're at your University interview)
4.       Makes you act smart when you should shut up
5.       Makes you lie
6.       Makes you tell the truth when you should lie (personally hate this one, I've become a terrible liar and I just don't try anymore) 
7.       Tells you that you should be doing one thing instead of the other but will make you do that one thing anyway
8.       Makes you complain in points on a blogpost
9.       Makes you retardedly uncoordinated when your extremely graceful significant other is sipping wine and staring at you
10.   Makes you want to get absolutely wasted the night before a meeting because it knows you actually really just want to be late and sleep through the whole thing anyway

Okay 20 is a bit much and I really believe you’ll stop reading if I go on, so I’m going to make my point now:
Even though the mind fucks around so much, it is the only part of you that has the strength to rectify whatever is going wrong. It is powerful enough to sleep when it should, eat when it should, understand what’s healthy and what’s not (physically, emotionally and psychologically), and it’s also the part of you that’s behind all the good and positive decisions you’ve made. And the best part is, if you just get to know your own mind, you'll be a lot happier speaking it!

So is it really an asshole? Um. YES. I think we can all be assholes sometimes, and our minds are behind that for sure, so it is very capable of messing with you. But is it an unbeatable asshole? No. No asshole is unbeatable and that's something I've learnt from comic books and video games - the good may get stupidly fucked up, but the villains get pretty mauled and desecrated eventually too. I mean, even in Mortal Kombat, the makers of the game allow you to perform Babalities/Fatalities/Brutalities on the boss characters Shao Kahn, Shang Tsung, Goro, Kintaro (and sometimes Motaro depending on the version you’re playing) mostly for fun, but I think it lends a parallel to beating something that seems really big and huge and difficult (or just spammy and irritating). So pick your end game combo, and when your brain acts up or is just being totally not cool, I say to you…



Okay no, don’t go to war with yourself. Just trust yourself - trust your knowledge of what’s good for you, and you’ll be fine.