Friday, February 06, 2004

The Power of a Suggestion…

Has anyone ever made a suggestion that changed your life?
People rarely know the power of their words, how far they can push a person… When last did someone’s suggestion make a drastic change in your life?

I bet the lady at the study bursary interview had no idea that I’d pack my bags and leave when she said: “…the bursaries available are mostly being distributed by our African students, being an immigrant lowers your chances…”
When the assistant at the counter asked me if I wanted to leave my curriculum with her, neither of us imagined that a month later I’d be wearing the same uniform as her.
And when my best friend said: “Why don’t you get your own apartment?” it wasn’t believing that the following month I’d already found one.

Chance? Destiny? Maybe it was written in the stars how things must turn out, nothing ever happened without a reason… yet it requires the power of suggestion to turn a possibility into fate.

A suggestion is a simple as a word, a picture or a sentence that is planted in your mind and grows to unpredictable sizes. In it’s young phase, it can be so frail and fragile that it dies almost as quickly as it was planted in your mind… some of these suggestions take a few days before dissolving in the mind, others take months… some never die. Suggestions that don’t grow very much larger to become more than a suggestion become nothing more than an option in the mind of its beholder… but there are those that grow to overtake the mind.

There are suggestions that completely override the mind like a virus in a computer system. Some argue that the suggestion was always there, dormant in the back of the subconscious, triggered by a word or a vision… others believe a suggestion is placed. Whatever the origin, it is still unknown how it grows on the mind. It first sits on your shoulder like the idea that won’t go away. Then it invades you thoughts, later it keeps coming up in your conversations and quite possibly you begin to draw or scribble words related to it. A slow and quiet evolution of madness, it accompanies you when you’re watching television and invades your dreams… and after a while, when you can’t ignore it much longer you realise that you either act upon it or let it drive you insane.

The way to prevent a suggestion from growing is to grab it at the roots… before it becomes stronger in your mind, wipe the slate. Don’t think about it. Ignore it until it ceases to exist in you mind… only then are you set free… if you’re lucky.

I have a thought in my head… I can’t get it out. It’s been eating away at the back of my subconscious like an irritating mosquito that I can’t kill. I thought that I had killed this buzz in my head weeks ago when I realised that the consequences of this thought becoming a reality would involve risk and inevitable heartbreak for more than one person. I fed intelligence and reality into my head until virtually no trace of the suggestion remained… But a seed must’ve stayed behind because someone made a suggestion and that thought grew into an unpredictable size. My thoughts are in a mess, my head is buzzing with a million thoughts and yet I can’t grasp at any of them. I feel irritable, confused and frustrated. A couple of days of repeated intelligence, distractions and lot and lots and lots of yoghurt will eliminate this virus in my system…
Considering that this virus leaves my system vulnerable, I warn anyone else with suggestion to back off or have your heads bitten off…

BEWARE… don’t ever underestimate the power of a suggestion!

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