Mind over matter

You know what?

The mind is a vile, corrosive, self-destructive time bomb just waiting to lead you head-on to your doom. It fills your head with despicable thoughts, it makes you stay awake all night thinking of all the abysmal things you have done and are doing in life, in compels you to lie in a foetal position all day watching mindless, borderline funny sitcoms huddled up inside your blanket like a cat, and it makes you gulp down cups of coffee hoping it might put some energy into your system.

 You know what else it does?

It secretes all the wrong hormones at all the wrong times; it makes you stare at a million open tabs on your screen without making you do any sort of work; it makes you want to cry out loud for the sheer impossibility of the situation it has put you into; it makes you feel like the days are long, but secretly the evil thing makes the time seem to move faster than ever. Why we had to be the ‘superior’ species with more intelligence than all the other animals, I fail to understand. I would rather be frolicking about naked in a jungle hunting for food, scratching my head, infested with termites and fleas with predators lurking around me than be in this situation. Or you know what? Maybe we are not as intelligent as we think we are. Seriously, is any one of us completely happy in this concrete, swarming, claustrophobic, noisy, blood-thirsty, stinking world we have created around us? A quote by Douglas Adams comes to mind at this juncture:

“On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Let’s get back to the vicious little thing the mind is.

It makes you write down pretentious text-book words like ‘juncture’ that you had learnt in high school; it makes you over-analyze things so much that you end up taking the wrong decisions; it makes your very survival on this planet seem almost impossible; it makes you want to scream, and say horrible things to people, and screw your life over. It makes you cry. Oh my dear GOD how it makes you cry.

Rock, paper, scissors. If only it was that simple. If only there was a Backspace button. If only people had a better control over the devil that resides inside their skulls. It also plays tricks on you. As a friend put it, it makes you feel “confused, angry, dejected, randomly optimistic and happy, then suddenly completely blah and fucked in the head a few minutes later”. It makes you go back in time and repeat scenarios differently over and over in your head till you feel you’d go insane. It has the potential to make every situation, every face, every song seem hollow. It is the one that makes you write such optimistic blog posts at 6:45 in the morning when your sleep-deprived body screams for some sleep.

And then it has the nerve to slyly sneak up on your shoulder and whisper “You got what you wanted. Are you happy now?”