The weather here has turned quite ropey, and what with it being that time of year when everything changes colour and falls to the ground, there’s a fair bit of debris around.
The front garden is strewn with leaves, there’s a whole load of organic detritus being carried down the river behind our house (which is higher than normal) and sitting on the glass of the rear-porch roof, is this clump of… matter.
“What other people think is between them and them”
So judge away!
Anyway, you can’t miss it. Every time I’m at the sink in the kitchen, there it is – BAM.
Big THING, sitting there above my head.
Now we live on the edge of the countryside, the rear porch is kinda tacked on the outside of the house really, and there’s a strong automatic light that goes on and off when the light levels drop.
So we’re used to hosting weird and wonderful and sometimes quite large insects and arachnids (and once the next door neighbour’s cat, but that’s another story for another time).
And when I get a glimpse of that tree-detritus up there, without fail, I have a little bit of a shock. Every. Single. Time. Because it looks like a massive spider or something… just for a moment, before I catch myself.
If I’m in a quite buoyant mood, I’ll chuckle to myself at how the mind automatically sees scary things wherever it goes… and maybe even consider writing about it.
(Hi 👋🏻 😄)
But if I’m in more of a low mood, the mind will get cross with the roof detritus, or chide itself for getting fooled again and being scared, or think that we should find some ingenious way of getting it off the roof, so that I don’t have to keep going through this terrible, terrible scenario 😫
Minds! 🙄
So here’s today’s “What if…?” for consideration.
What if… it wasn’t just innocent roof detritus that the mind sees danger in?
What if… that’s actually its millennia-old job? To see threats everywhere, when there are none?
And while it’s easy enough to see that this isn’t a spider, it’s just some crap on my filthy porch roof, some of the other mind-creations are a bit more subtle.
What are you scaring yourself with at the moment?
What would it help to see through, today?
💟
Giles
p.s. As I was writing this I was reminded of my all time favourite ever TED talk, by Anna Debenham. In it, she relates the inside-out understanding by telling a story of how she helped her niece with scary bedtime shadows. And also chickens. Lots of chickens. 🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓 If you’ve not seen it, it’s a rare treat – you must check it out:
The best TED talk you'll ever see in your life. Fact.