Why is it so unnatural for us to recognize and appreciate our healthiness? We always say it, but it is always true, that you don't appreciate your wellness until you are sick. Why don't we ever overcome that?? Well, I guess some people do...but I haven't yet.
You see, it wasn't until about noon today, after I'd been moving to and fro all over campus, that I realized I haven't been limping all day! My ankle seems to have somehow miraculously healed overnight...and I didn't even notice. Ridiculous.
So yesterday, I did something fairly embarrassing. I had just gotten done with work, and casually turned off all the monitors and microphones and lights...I walked upstairs, put in my headphones, and quietly and cheerfully headed toward my car. The song I was listening to got to one of its quiet parts, when all of a sudden, I walked under an inactive streetlight that blasted me with light directly over my head just as the dramatic key change in the song erupted through my ears. For some strange reason, the very first thought that burst from my brain was..."ALIENS!!" I flipped out. In a mad dash to get out from underneath the tractor beam, I slipped on the sinisterly placed patch of ice and totally biffed it on my face. I'm sure it would have been extremely amusing to anyone who may have had the privilege of watching my instantaneous and violent collapse on the ground. I'm just glad that if anyone did see it, they didn't have access to my thoughts. I don't know what possessed me to genuinely believe I was about to be abducted by aliens, but it happened.
This world would be so much more of an amusing place if we all immediately expressed our first thoughts about something....most of us would probably look a lot ditsier. Did you know that YOU aren't even aware of most of your initial reactions to things analytically in your brain? That's right, your brain is acting so fast all the time, that it instantaneously interprets any experience around you, trying to make sense of it. But, since the first thousand initial thoughts about a situation are almost always wrong, your brain has learned to inhibit most of those reactions from reaching the more conscious mind until it has made several hundred processes. It is when a couple of those leak into our consciousness just before the correct interpretations are reached that we do something really stupid like think that your leg has magically disappeared or that your friend was just absorbed into the earth or that two siblings just got engaged to each other or that you just instantaneously lost your hearing or your mother has been killed or that you're being abducted by aliens.
It saddens me that so many of us are so worried about being judged by others, and we know that these initial thoughts are sometimes entirely stupid, we often do not react on our initial impressions, but rather hold back and do nothing, or keep watching. Sometimes, that initial impression is right, and it is just in time to get that second chance you thought you'd lost, or to comfort a seriously grieving friend, or to leap out of the way of danger, or to safe a family member's life.
Don't you think that we ought to cultivate our immediate reaction to high-pressure thoughts we have? I don't know about you, but I'd say that developing a skill that will save a loved one is worth falling on your face running away from aliens once in a while.
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