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Forty Songs
(The flip sides of motivation, survival and will)
(A selected excerpt from my book Forty Songs, 2000, which spelled out twenty real-life problems and their twenty corresponding real-life solutions)
-By Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut
Side 3a lyric - The Negative flip
Why even bother?
(The problem of being human)
3A OUR MINDS ARE CONSTANTLY IMPRISONED
We are all, to one degree or another, prisoners. There are no visible bars around our prison. We constructed this prison ourselves, from the insecurities and instabilities of our own minds. It is there that we have chosen to live, and it is there that our struggles take place.
So very often, the details of our lives don't proceed like we want them to. We succumb to negative patterns of thoughts, and the enslavement of various obsessions and compulsions. We try to get free, and sometimes we even break from the shackles and make a run for it; we make a great run for freedom. All-too-often though, we come creeping back, and oftentimes, ironically enough, at the very time the bloodhounds are being called off the trail.
Our torments are constant, and they are endless. We usually can't find ways around them, through them, or between them. They plague us in the day. They plague us in the night. We can't get free of them because they have an invisible hold on us that we have not yet come to understand; it's actually something we have never really figured out.
Most certainly, if we could, we would, but we can't. So we remain prisoners to these patterns of thought, and these varied notions that seem totally hell-bent on keeping us their captive.
The patterns repeat themselves often. We think countless thoughts during each period of waking consciousness, but unfortunately they are most always the same old thoughts we were thinking yesterday.
They don't even start to liberate us.
At one time they might have done it, but not now. Yesterday's positive thoughts were used up on yesterday's needs. We need something new today, new thoughts to breath new life into us, and if we don't get it we will wilt and rot here in this prison of our own mind.
We are not aware enough of the process, of how it all works. We are impressionable. In our impressionable state, we absorb the ideas that fail to liberate us. We inculcate into our thinking the thoughts that only reinforce our "sentence." It all becomes overwhelming from time to time. We long to break out. But the prison bars and doors are too strong for us. So we remain enslaved within them.
We seek a savior, but one never comes. Pseudo-saviors abound, but never fully satisfy. We seek an honest to goodness way out. It is never found. We seek stimulation. But we are not finding anything to move us because we have become immobilized by our own inadequate ways of seeing everything.
We're stuck and we don't know it. Or we're stuck, and we know it.
But then
Side 3b lyric - The Positive spin
What's to keep us going?
(Alternative looks at existence)
3B THE PRISON DOORS WERE OPEN ALL ALONG
We choose prison over freedom. Our thoughts put us behind invisible bars; they come from the same place where we can become free. We need to know that as we move in the direction of our thoughts; we become those very thoughts. We are occupied with whatever we are thinking about. So then, what is it that we are we thinking about?
Our thoughts can take us to wherever we want. If we are thinking about nothing, we are likely floundering, bored and becoming apathetic. If we are thinking negativities, they are taking us down worthless avenues that we don't need. If we are thinking positive, life affirming thoughts, we go in that direction.
There are, then, at least three possibilities: no thought, negative thought and life enhancing thought; what shall our thoughts be for today?
While we have some degree of confinement in our bodies, which know more about the confines of limitation, this is not so with our thoughts. If we don't like who we are, or what we are, we can remake ourselves. This is something we can do. Is it easy? Maybe not, but at least it is doing something. We have options. We are not without hope.
Our thoughts created what we are today. They can take us farther. We have used up so little of the resources available to us; there is so much more left to use. What do we want to do? What do we want to be? We can do it. We can be it. It's within our grasp.
Are we depressed? More than likely this is from a thought - a depressing thought, of course. What can we do about the thought? We can think a new one? We can think a thought that is not a depressing one, and that new thought can replace the old, depressed one.
Will this happen like magic? And does it occur overnight? It may take a while; like anything else it requires some application. But is it magic?
Yes, in fact it is. It is the magic of our own human minds.
Are we tired of being tired? Think a thought that is not so tiring, and let it occupy the positive spaces of our mind
then see what happens. Is there confusion and chaos in our minds? We can quiet them through the various forms of meditation and calming practices that are relatively easy to use. We use them everyday anyway, so it's just a matter of recognition.
Let us then recognize.
As we contemplate our prison with no visible bars around it, we see that the way to freedom is just simply to walk from the place of confinement. That's all.
And on our way out, we shouldn't forget to pat the nice bloodhound on his head. He's a good dog, really.
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