Food For Thought

carla.ornelas@gmail.com

Forbidden thoughts have been on everyone’s minds as I received an amazing amount of e-mails commenting on this particular entry. Touching a sensitive nerve, I realized that almost everyone is secretly torturing themselves with thoughts that are unwanted by their brains. They define what is good for them and expect their soul to comply and when it doesn’t they begin to think that there is something wrong with their system.

What I expressed in my recent entry was the belief that to think the thoughts that are forbidden by our minds is as natural as smiling or sighing. That even though we can program our heads, we can never program our hearts.

This isn’t to say that the heart doesn’t already know what head tells it, it is to say that the heart takes longer to accept what is almost immediately registered by your mind.

Think back to all the hardest decisions in your life: ending a relationship, moving away, changing your lifestyle. All decisions that have been properly computed into your mind’s system and agreed on by your heart… and yet, we have doubts and struggle to move on. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we hold on to our past, it means that our hearts treasure the good in the old and have difficulty in letting go.

That old teddy, that meaningful conversation, the unforgettable kiss and that lover that no longer occupies a space in your heart or in your bed… may still roam in the hidden files of your thoughts. The thoughts you don’t want to be thinking or remembering, those that you have labeled as “forbidden”.

Yet we think them, we replay them and modify them to suit our heart’s desires. Our heart seems to know no failure, it hopes and holds faith and hangs on to everything that is good about someone or a situation. Compared to a child, our hearts are the part of us that is innocent, willing things to be different and therefore does not let of people, things and situations which it believes still hold hope of love and happiness. It might even know deep down the truth of change, and yet its hope dies slowly. This hope is what haunts our dreams and thoughts, and so we punish ourselves for not being able to erase them from our system.

Worried that I might encourage obsession, I thought twice about publishing that first entry and three times about publishing this sequel. It is hard to write to strangers whose state of mind you know nothing about. What you take from my message depends on your perspective. However, what I’d like to define is the difference held between obsession and maturity. Obsessive is the person who holds onto the past using it as an excuse to not look onto the future and mature is the person who recognizes his thoughts, accepts them for what they are and has the strength not to act upon them. This mature person patiently knows to give his/her heart time to accept what it already knows.