I hate writing.

Don’t get me wrong, I could write all day about whatever flutters across my attention and then the next thing, I just can’t get a lot of practical use out of it.

On the other hand, I love to read. But one thing I love more than any of those things is Math. I couldn’t really tell you why, but I just adore numbers, and I get a kick out of manipulating them. And when I’m working on a really long math problem, and all the equations on the paper come into alignment with the ideas on how to solve them in my head… The feeling is, quite frankly, beyond the scope of verbal comprehension.

I like to think the same way about my sentences though. It’s also difficult to describe how I think that way; nonetheless it is a conscious process for me, sort of the type of thinking that you would use while conjugating verbs for spanish. And every once in a while, I’ll read a sentence or see a word phrase, and it’s usually those special types of phrases that can only happen in the english language, and it will just agree with me.

So, I think I hate writing because, when I do write, I like my words to be aesthetically pleasing. And when I read a good novel, I know that it’s really good because the content of the writing comes into alignment with the aesthetics of the words, and when a writer’s words are just as pretty as his message… That, to me, is beautiful writing.

For those of you who actually read up to here, congratulations. You are the type of people who (I hope) might genuinely enjoy my articulate matter. For the rest of you,

THIS IS THE MIND CONTROL PART:

I wasn’t controlling anybody else’s mind. Such a notion is totally bizarre and unlikely (Or is it? We’ll find out later…). What I was doing was controlling my own mind. 

So? Who the hell cares? Everybody can do that. Wait… Can you do that? Can you control your own mind? How about an experiment? Okay, I ask you to stop thinking about purple hamsters, meaning all you have to do is not think about purple hamsters. Go ahead, stop thinking about them. C’mon now, it’s not that hard. Stop thinking about them already. Can you please stop? Okay, enough with the purple hamsters already.

I’m just kidding, but you can probably start to see what I mean when I say that it’s hard to control your own mind.

Unless you’re about 10 steps ahead of me, there’s a good chance that you thought about purple hamsters. In fact, the only way that you couldn’t be thinking about them is if you hadn’t read my post up to the point when I began writing about them. So what am I doing right now? (Mind control? No…Not yet at least.)

Humans, for whatever reason, have the ability to think. The content of our thought varies (obviously); but content is irrelevant here. What’s important right now is how our ability to think is activated, and there are only two ways in which it is:

Automatic Thinking: This first way in which we think is a process that is involuntary. And by involuntary, I mean it is quite literally impossible to turn this off. But, by no means is that a bad thing. It’s to our advantage that we don’t have to think about walking every time we walk. Almost in the same way that our heart beats without us telling it to, our thoughts activate to help us function daily. Unfortunately, every once in a while we begin to have thoughts that are undesirable (purple hamsters...), and so to help manage that, we’ve got another special feature:

Controlled Thinking: This is us telling ourselves to stop thinking about purple hamsters (I’ll stop now); this is the type of thinking that we use to write, solve problems, learn, etc… ‘Controlled thinking’ is you thinking about what to do with your free time. It’s also you thinking about the quickest route home at the end of the day. The difference between this and automatic thinking is that you are actually exerting effort for these thoughts, therefore you are ‘controlling’ them.

So… What do we do about those pesky purple hamsters? (Now I can’t stop thinking about them… Oh, the irony) Well, the basic idea here is that we should use our controlled thinking feature to override our automatic thinking feature. So, how does that work?

If you did read my big long introduction, then you saw an example of this type of ‘thought control.’ To understand this, take a moment to imagine yourself as a student who has to write a blog post. He hates writing, and since he can only think about how he hates it, he starts to write about his hatred. His ideas for what to say next were automatic, but since he could only think about his perpetual hatred, he decided to direct his controllable thoughts to something he enjoyed, Math. 

When I directed my thoughts, I thought about how I liked Math, which then led me to think about the exactness of mathematics, which then led to me thinking about the exactness of beautiful writing, thereby putting me in a frame of mind to write. A lot.

There is a caveat to this. It’s very easy to unsuccessfully direct your thoughts, or direct them to something more negative. But that’s not the end of the world. Nothing is absolute, but if this does happen then you’ll probably be susceptible to a negative change in mood.

Knowing that you can have your thoughts tesselate towards something more desirable or productive is just scratching the surface of what we can do. I gave a very compressed summary of automatic and controlled thinking, but hopefully by now you’ll understand why I did. If you’re interested in this subject specifically then you should look it up on the internet; unfortunately, I have to finish for now.

I hope this week’s segment was as enjoyable for you as it was for me! Tune in next week, and I’ll show you how to control time with your mind (I’m not kidding about that one…).