So the danger here and now is that I have ideas and notions, collected them along the way, more arriving daily. I believe in certain things: that there can be no good from spraying chemicals on a lawn no matter how important it might seem to have green green green; that it is wholly unnecessary to use an entire capful of laundry detergent because, after all, the manufacturer wants to sell us more detergent so the more we use the sooner we'll need to buy more. But these things are really habits, maybe not beliefs, and not ideas. Beliefs I think are what we stand on, what we use to navigate the world, the garden out the back door, the aisles of the Quik-Mart. And new beliefs are not easy to come by. Our mind considers the new notion, sniffs it to see if it can get a read on it, whirls around then kicks its hind legs at it covering it with old beliefs. Or maybe it sniffs and leaves it at that, leaves it to sit there, wait and see.
A new idea is harder still to fathom, not from lack of intelligence but from distrust. We tried that thing called new ideas, once, tried them on for size; the idea of Santa Claus and then there that went, the idea that it's for your own good and how it came to mean this will hurt or taste bad or make us feel downright horrible. We wrote our ideas on the paper and saw them sitting there neatly, deftly cut into bits by the professor's red sharpie. So, new ideas, no thank you, no sirree. Our mind learned a long time ago to hide behind the newspaper and that which was presented to us as truth or fact, harrumph! it open, thus shutting out the racket and clamor, the unsettling noise and downright chaos, of those new ideas. No, new ideas marched in the street and did not cut their hair and the music was like nothing anyone had ever heard. And later, new ideas came strutting on stage wearing really really baggy shorts and big gold chains and there was that to deal with.
But then we begin to get old and the backward spiral sets in. Only this go-round, lo and behold, we whiz past those thoughts and it is like some wild, youthful dance only who knew we could move this fast, who knew getting old would have so many many new thoughts? And there they are, the ones we never did anything with save sniff and maybe touch noses. And so people think we've gone batty or lost a screw when one of us says I'm going to vote Democrat when we used to give every free day to the NRA, or when the couch potato amongst us announces I'm thinking I will cancel the cable and just read, there is so much I want to read! There are conditions to be diagnosed and nice, safe places they can send us to be with the other old crazies and medications to give us just in case we talk about these notions, in the event we theorize and philosophize these crazy thoughts, to anybody young.
