Usefulness. How can we be sure something is truly useful? A table is largely regarded as useful, so too a bicycle or a house. There are practicalities. Nothing can be built, designed, engineered, made, fashioned or whatever without first a thought.
There must also be a perceived need. I could really do with something to put my things on that’s not the floor to make it easier to manage and access. I could do with something like a table. Mind is the starting point for everything. Without conception there can be no construction. I reckon that’s pretty well universally accepted.
So, thoughts can be good. They can lead to useful stuff, groovy ideas, scientific breakthroughs etc. But thoughts can also be bad. Two really bad thoughts ennobled into language are the ghastly impostors by the names of “should” and “shouldn’t”.
I’ve lived a lot of my life in a “coulda woulda shoulda” type vibe. I should have done this, they should have done that, I could and would have done this or that if x y or z had happened, which it didn’t etc. Stuck in this stinking thinking, I inhabit a horrible world of inertia and resentment. It keeps me stuck where I am, a prisoner of my own self-pity and the blame game. I might have a good case but it doesn’t help me or anyone else for that matter.
Many times, subtly, do I fall victim to should and shouldn’t thinking in its various guises and degrees. I see folk that I don’t like or I think I don’t like. Something is wrong with them, too ugly, too pretty, bad hair, wrong type of children/cardigan, accent, glasses etc. Or I might in effect think, often without realising, “By crikey she should not be that way! I must regulate her thoughts, words and deeds pronto. That person must be morally adjusted – by the power of my mind!”. You get the picture. One day I won’t do it because I’m aware, on another I’ll do it and justify every last judgment, and on a third day I’ll do it and keep catching myself on and go in and out of awareness. I’ll wake up and then go back to sleep. Many times.
Never have two little literary arrangements wrought so much havoc. We hear them all the time. I break my leg. I say it shouldn’t have happened. What do I mean? It clearly has happened. My believing it was wrong that it happened only adds resentment to my knackered limb. What’s done is done and cannot be undone. We can of course seek to put in place measures that will decrease the likelihood of something that has caused harm and seek to prevent it from happening again. But that is purely practical and sensible. “You should have brought a bag for that big pile of library books so I don’t have to carry them for you my dear”, is not the species of should I’m talking about here.
What, after all, do should and shouldn’t mean? I can look it up in the dictionary. But what does it mean to me at an inner level? It means a denial of what is. A lack of acceptance. That shouldn’t have happened. Who can say this with absolute conviction? Who has intelligence great enough with scope wide enough to possibly know with certainty that was has occurred is an error of destiny so to speak? How many times something really “bad” has happened to me only to find out it’s the best thing that could have happened in the light of subsequent events. When looked at in this light is it not vanity that fuels my self-righteous indignation and ultimately stubborn resistance to what is. Is it not egocentric caprice that attempts to deny the facts, the suchness, the present moment? Are not should and shouldn’t the ego’s attempt at denying the way things are? This is, in the purest sense of the word, insane.
I’m an inveterate storyteller. I write narratives in my mind with a speed so deft, they become the truth without my even knowing I’ve subscribed to them. I’ve written a press release, bought into it and held it up as the overarching truth, as the final perspective, all in the blink of an eye. I don’t know I’ve done it because at that point there is no alternative. I’m locked in without knowing I’m in prison.
Whenever I do it, that is to adjudge a situation person place thing as wrong, I might as well sit on the beach and expect to turn the tide because I don’t like its direction. After all, do I want to be right or do I want to be happy? Accept or resist? As Hamlet says, “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
I’m learning that it is an inside job. Gradually.
Simon Measures
07543 859330
