Snehashree
Guest blogger
The real trouble comes when attempting to make the right statements. Very few people can speak their minds, but then some really do know how to. But for making the right statements, one would need to think right.
Appropriate thinking is considered to come normally to all. But, this part of the action- thinking right is the most difficult for humans. We are always being coerced to choose a path.
“You think you know how to think right?” Sandra sat chewing a toothpick after lunch. Sandra was financing my meals for the day. I was broke, a student on the roads trotting states and mountains. She was kind and warm, had the least demands, and offered me a warm bed. Brooming the house early in the morning was her demand and a hundred bucks for the bed at night is all she charged me for a week.
“Yes, I think I know how to think right. I can think right. Yes, I do.” I nodded while setting my eyes far up on a mountain peak that was playing the game of shadows with the sunlight.
“So, I would want you to write down your eating process, what you thought while you were eating, everything about that space where you ate so quietly. Will you do it?”
I felt mildly challenged, “Really? You think I can’t write it out, everything as I thought?”
“We’ll see. You see there are three problems to it- remembering everything the way you thought, the embarrassment issues, and then converting your electrically impulsive thoughts into words. These words have to be chosen carefully to depict exactly what you want to portray instead of using words that make no sense,” she said as she sat in front of me.
“Wellbeing is associated with, how we think & act. Right?” I confirmed back, not that I was new to the word, but then, I was still learning.
“Yes it is, but there is a whole process in it.” She moved her arms round and round to depict the process.
“What do you mean by embarrassment issues?” I quite did not catch up with that part.
“Well, if I ask everyone to define their thoughts from one minute to another, there would be many who would either fall out of trees or get dropped off, dumped, even killed for what people think in their heads. You got to admit we’re mostly dirty in there. Biologically we are dirty and smelly inside. So are our thoughts, even they are mostly wrapped in the slime of time?”
“Woof, woof, let me try.” I cooed out.
She squealed and cackled all at the same time.
But then I saw the difference.That whole afternoon I wrote what I thought in just 20 minutes. It seemed tough at first, since though I was not aware of what I was thinking but when I sat writing them down, I then noticed my thoughts had jumped from one point to another almost seventeen times in that small span.
It was not a very entertaining process, I discovered. It was rather a very grueling one.
- Detailing out every thought seemed like jargon first.
- Then I tried understanding why was I even writing them down.
- I had to then coerce my mind to follow Sandra’s orders.
- Finally, I had to convince my mind what I was doing would improve me as an individual and would tell me how to think.
Sandra was a small-time hippie, ran off from a job and a family she couldn’t relate to, anymore. It was almost five years away from home, roaming in the wilderness, and mountains with a whiff of fresh air and more vagabonds.
Sandra was raised in foster care, a family she did not want but then a bright mind, she stood up to take to college. Soon, she ran into debts for her college fees, and each time she did, she knew she was close to taking a job. Just after college, she found a job and went into it. Five years into it, she had cleared all her debts.
But, then two more years she saved to come up here.
“A treat to self,” she called it.
Roaming in the mountains she earned cash from the help she offered her fellow travelers and men living high up in the Himalayan ranges.
She could mend computers- hardware as well as software. High up in the mountains she could fix TVs, fridges, radios, washing machines, toasters, and even scooters, and quite unbelievably, even cars.
“Most people think it’s a dirty game to ride the streets but then I can say I’m an honest hippie,” she’d say.
In five more years, she had a small, rickety, wooden home whose floors creaked and squawked. There was a broken heater which she would frequently mend and restore.
But then she also had a lot of dead batteries, a beautiful rug, two warm and inviting beds, one for herself and one for girls lost up in the mountains like me, windows facing the mountains, with the sun shining on your face when you wake up early in the morning.
“My wellbeing is to know what I am thinking and how it’s benefitting me.” She said.
I was a student merely learning the ways of the world, what could I say. Away from home on a tight budget, with a mind that was hungry to learn the truth behind our lives, I spent seven precious days with her.
On the last day as I was ready to leave, she came up to the bus station with me and suddenly said,
“I think you must know that there is a high chance you’ll do a desk job for 15 years or so.”
“How do you know?” I never wanted a desk job, I always wanted to be out in the field, and my heart skipped a beat.
“Since, you need to know that sitting is after all not a bad task at all.” She smiled and unfortunately, that’s what I am still doing and now I don’t mind if it’s already fifteen years of sitting.
After a pause, she said, “Sitting can help settle your mind. Sometimes, I think what if I hadn’t been here and in some place in Albuquerque, would I have been so wise then?Just by sitting down can you achieve anything?Then I learned that sitting was enough. Sit wherever you want and you can achieve what I have here. Thinking right, without being forced into thinking it is the first baby step towards your wellness. Only when you can think right you can do right and that happens to only a few.”
I shrugged merely for how could I answer such a question. I had never been to Albuquerque and would never will. For all, a place can bring to those who live there is hard to tell.
Sandra has been globetrotting since then and says someday she will write a book on it, but that someday is far since she is too happy being a hippie even at 45. She is unlike most other hippies, her room is always clean, and smells like sweet pine fruit. She is always close to some mountain; she calls them the Emblem of Fire. She does not smoke joints and drinks good wine when she can. She is far from those who sit clotted in their thoughts for she is the girl who knows how to think straight and crooked. She can even twist thoughts and off late, she can do it on others. The last time we spoke, she said she had joined a Yoga center and was teaching mind-bending to people who came up to her.
I have learned the effect of gravity on the mind and thoughts from her. I have learned about different ways of thinking, mostly about twisted minds from her. I have learned wielding and yielding to such minds too from her. But then I haven’t mastered it well enough.
She says, “Take it easy and stay away from the dirt that grows when human thoughts vomit out. Stay away from others’ vomits and you’d do fine.”
Banner Photo Credits: Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
Snehashree is a content writer by profession, and she writes on almost all the niches. She writes poetry, a book is also available on Amazon, called “A Hiatus from the Loaded Past”. She also regularly writes on her blog: https://www.rollercoasterrideonlife.blog/ and on her website, https://www.writersnehashree.com/. She is a part of IndieITPress and Talking Zebras Group.
