Thinking About Thinking About Thinking

Today tastes like a Third World Market--vibrant flowers, lush fruit, and flesh that has not been wrapped in cellophane and doused with sanitizers and deodorants.

We're back to the whole "think positive" meme again at the Lunchbox. I begin to wonder if that will be this decade's leitmotif, starting with the 2000 election, the events of September 2001, and the War. I'm visualizing not hearing about this again for a couple of months . . .

I just had an Anthony Robbins quote tossed in my teeth: "Thinking positively is like staring out the window at a garden full of weeds and saying, 'There are no weeds. There are no weeds.' "

Clever enough as far as it goes--the weeds are there and denying their existance will not make them magically *poof* away. However, the flip side is staring out at your garden--which has some weeds--and saying "There are no flowers. There are no flowers."

Denying the flowers won't make them go away, but it will make you less responsive to doing what it takes to nurture them ('coz there ARE no flowers, so far as you're concerned, right?) And soon, you will be right, there WILL BE NO FLOWERS.

Lucky you. You get to be right. Joyless, flowerless, but right.

Once again, you have to get up off your ass and go interact with the garden. If there are weeds that you cannot live with, go and pull them. If you want more flowers, go and plant them.

If you want a happier life, go and create it. Decide what it is you want, what the next step to getting there is, and go do it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But what if you don't want to let go of what you have? What if that next step takes you away from everything that is same and familiar--if weed-raddled?

Then you've MADE your choice, dumpling. You'd rather have weeds and moan about the weeds than get out the dandilion fork/hire a gardener/buy weedkiller. THAT'S YOUR CHOICE.

Visualizing a world where common sense IS BOTH. Oooooooohhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm . . .