A Starving Mind Hungers for Ruin

The scarcity of thoughts leads to the motion of untrammelled dreams, a tsunami of figments and a welter of emotions. When the mind is preying upon too few thoughts, our imagination turns surreal rather than creative, sabotaging rather than salvaging, inflicting rather than invigorating. Slim thoughts are always dangerous to mental well-being.

Psychologists and therapists are, in my reckoning, dipshits - vultures feeding on stories, sucking up data from the present for the next diagnosis. Alternatively, a transformation in mental health could arise from vibrant participation in an animated inner life, illuminated by plentiful thoughts and colourful bursts of imagination, a poem devoid of alphabets but rich in visions.

From watching a squirrel to the ticking of a clock, the events around us are infinite. It's up to us how we feed these rich thoughts into our minds. When the mind becomes immune to new thoughts, it is susceptible to being nuked by old, ugly, and detrimental ones.

Old practices must die, evaporate, parch off to make space for fresh, verdant, and charismatic new beginnings. These new expeditions must nail shut the coffins of old, tumultuous, and iniquitous memories.

The human mind is uniquely prone to succumbing to old thoughts. No other animal is likely to commit suicide; they keep refreshing their inner worlds. But the human mind cannot relinquish the past so easily and in doing so, it inflicts pain upon itself.

When I refer to “old thoughts,” I mean those that are burdensome in their intensity, their sheer weight of sadness, their sharpness in evoking pain, their tendency to add imaginary wings to a hypothetical case, their propensity to layer on distrust, fear, and acute sorrow. This package of trepidation and trembling worry can crucify our self-belief and distort our very reality.

The mind should be a kaleidoscope, a reflecting mirror of all we see, smell, and hear. It should be an elegant bastardization of grey pulp, infused with varied, vibrant thoughts and a motley of mixed imaginations. Allowing such intensity of free-flowing ideas helps the mind escape the tyranny of singularity. The human mind is a ticking time bomb: one slimy, homogeneous thought can detonate it, either inwardly or outwardly.

How do you develop compassion? By cherishing a vast array of life events and feeling sorrow for those who never experienced them. How do you develop cleverness? By sharpening your senses to avoid vulnerability, and refining your process of selection. How do you develop courage? By exercising confidence through tackling challenges at various levels.

The thickness and frequency of events and thoughts are pivotal in shaping our senses and our mental philosophy.

A mind only opens when it has been closed by an overflow of experiences : sights, sounds, feeds, reads, music, paintings, meows, colors, and more. But a mind closed by one singular, lugubrious thought is once again a time bomb, ready to detonate, internally or externally at someone.

How are you closing your mind today?

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