Tacky and Teflon Thoughts
When I was a kid we stayed one summer in a tiny village in southern France. It sounds much more poetic than the heat, humidity and dysfunction of our situation supplied. My memories are most vivid around the incidents that came with strong body reactions. There was the time when our dog impregnated a local farmer’s hound and he stabbed our poor lad in the eye, leaving my Mother at odds end trying to speak enough French to the local Vet to save our Corgi’s life. Not to mention when our Abyssinian gave birth on our return trip home and I actually pulled her out of the on-flight carryon bag so that she could nurse the kittens on the tray table. But those are shaggy dog stories of another time.
It was not so much the big events, but the smaller annoyances that remain in my cellular library even after all these years. The bugs were innumerable that summer and our attempt to save ourselves from blood thirsty creatures was futile. We burned green coils that no doubt contained chromosome altering chemicals, we enclosed everything we could in netting and we hung those long spiral strips of organge-glo paper in every room. The thing about these tacky ribbons is that the fly didn’t actually die on contact. It was as if we had a live buzzing symphony of the macabre hanging from the ceiling. And without fail at least once a day I would mindlessly walk into one of the fly strips and get the glue along with the wriggling creepy-crawly stuck on my head. Some memories just plain STICK!
I think that is what I notice most these days. I still seem to have the same old thoughts run around my empty head. But lately, I notice which ones seem to take hold of all of my attention, while others come and go without much self identification.
Earlier this month we rented a wheelchair to see if it would be of any assistance to me in getting up and out of the house. So many stories came up around this new device. One night on the way to the bath room I listened to an entire conversation in my head about what my Mother would say – even though I hadn’t spoken with Mom in months. Yet in my head the dialog was loud and clear, “What are you now some kind of baby who needs to be pushed around in a stroller? How infantile are you going to become before you grow up!” The sticky thoughts can go on for a long time before we recognize we are dreaming and come back to the moment that is before our eyes.
On my first week out in the chair, my husband drove me to a neighborhood park. We hadn’t been to that park for over a year, something my egoic mind could have wrapped around and danced a jig. But on this day all that was present were thoughts of what a pathetic looser I was. How I was never going to get any better and how I am never making any progress. The thoughts were in direct disparity to what the situation seemed to hold. Yet they were tacky and believable in the moment nonetheless.
In contrast, when we went out for a drive yesterday and went to a local hardware store, which we had not been to in about a year, there was a distinct Teflon quality to the thoughts that tagged along for the ride. I didn’t end up going inside the store at all. Instead we tooled around for only a few minutes on the outskirts of the garden zone taking snapshots with my cellphone to document our outing. But this time, when the judgments of inadequacy came, I could see them for the bio-chemical feeding calls of the body’s cellular organism. Nothing more or less, and certainly nothing personal.
Same words, different textures. I wondered, what is it about a circumstance that allows for a thought to turn into a tacky or Teflon moment? And do I have a choice in manipulating my experience? Ultimately I don’t know the answer. It would seem there is little conscious selection of the thought patterns that are invoked … but lately it would appear there is more freedom to just sit back and watch them fall away rather than walk head on into the fly trap.
