A few days ago I attended to a TEDx event. I was among the first wave of curious people walking down the hall and taking a small cupcake from the trays on the tables. A comfortable seat seemed to whisper my name, so I attended the call and reclined myself against the wall.
What I observed was exactly what I expected: phones and conversations. People were either on their phones or talking to someone else. I won’t say I was shocked, because I’ve seen this behavior so many times that somehow I got used to it.
Instead of shocked, I was sad. Sad to see that little attention was given to our most precious asset: our mind. Since I didn’t feel ready to get up and walk around without first giving some time to myself, I decided to stay motionless were I was.
And so I went, drifting away from reality and giving more and more wings to my thoughts. But suddenly, they stopped flying.
One woman entered the hall. She was part of the event, and was wearing a dress with a metal frame. Many card were hanging on her dress, each one with a different message. She was walking among people, asking them to take one card with a message.
My thoughts, once free and flying, were imprisoned in that cage-dress she was wearing. I immediately noticed how hard for her it was to move in that dress. The metal frame, invariably rigid, offered a considerable resistance that allowed the woman to move only with small steps.
Ideas were hanging around her. External ideas; external ideology. She was carrying the work and the thoughts of other people, and they were doing exactly what I could see: restricting her freedom.
Don’t we fall, without noticing, thousands of times into this trap? Don’t we furnish our minds with external ideas and carry their burden with us?
After realizing these questions, I stopped seeing the woman as a woman. Somehow my bird-thoughts were free again. Only when I acknowledged the cage I was able to break free.
So I started seeing the woman as a byproduct: a consequence of passive action toward ideologies. Anyone could hang anything on her dress, and she would not question the content of the papers. They would start walking with her, and they would become part of her. Of course, this was part of the event. But it couldn’t express in a clearer manner the way many of us act when we face ideas and thoughts.
We furnish our brains with semi-ready thoughts. We read books and articles (if we read at all), and we internalize chunks of information that we think will be valuable to us. We assume that any idea out there is an important idea. We give very little thought to process this information, and so we start accumulating useless pieces of paper around our minds.
And sitting I was, when I saw the woman coming in my direction. “My turn”, I thought. So I got up and took three pieces of paper at once. Below I describe them:
- Paper #1: couldn’t read (therefore, couldn’t understand);
- Paper #2: not logically consistent;
- Paper #3: could give some food for thought, but essentially it said nothing.
I wonder why I was not surprised. These papers were written by people that carried thoughts of other people. They represented three very common phenomena that happen more often than we think:
- Paper #1 represents everything that we carry without understanding;
- Paper #2 represents fallacies and unsolid reasoning; things that appear to be true, but are built on false premises;
- Paper #3 represents a few ideas that sound beautiful, but that say nothing in their essence.
And so we move on, carrying a lot of trash around our minds.
The birds of my thought, even though not properly trained yet, were able to recognize these patterns. My actions were as simple as they could be: digest and throw away what is senseless.
Without any astonishment, I found myself walking next to a trash bin, with both hands free. Without any astonishment, I found my birds walking rested on my shoulders, as light and as free as a bird can be.
The Nemo Writer 