bear with me on this (non-d related) writing journey,

“Life is what occupies your mind at the time.”

A man once told me that. He said it within the body of a spoken paragraph intended as a precursor to the next four.

How peculiar a preface, as if to say that that which doesn’t involve the mind is disconnected from that which we consider to be most essentially ours.

Life.

Your life.

My life.

What begins as a simple pseudo-philosophical outlook on being concedes to something deeper with surprising complexity.

For if content and context form the contours of life, then one’s life is exclusively theirs. Yours. Mine. Hers. His. While this coincides with language structures, the human experience leads us to feel otherwise. We feel an intersection, connection, human to heart, human, to heart.

Look in and listen. Study the topography of another human’s emotionhood and discover that even the most basic values are built upon labyrinthine metaphors.

Like a good read. Open as teen, one thing. Open as adult, another. I comprehend what is relative to my existence in that place at that time. Yes.

Relativity.

Going further.

The logical compliment, the negation, of what life is not… According to the wise man’s logic:

Life is not that which does not occupy the mind at the time.

Strolling about town, I come upon a child and his mother, also strolling. In an act of mass impulse, thoughts of future children and livelihoods become narratives. Consumed by what may become, the question begs answer, if life is that which ocupies the mind, then does my life become what I imagine it to be in any given instance?

Assuming that it is, that my life is what I imagine it to be, then what is there that can be considered ‘not life’? For in each passing thought, for in each inquisitive moment begging to find “is this life”, by this maxim it is bound to be result in a yes, for it has entered the mind.

If life can be what one envisions it to be by occupying the mind of such things, then the negation cannot be true.

The wise man’s maxim rings loudly with the kind of value and validity we rally behind. We can logic our way into disbelief, but little can we do to say no to the kind of hopeful messages that encourage growth and progress. It is with great intensity such maxims to hold true. Growth and progress.

If life is what occupies your mind at the time, then life is what you imagine it to be filled with and made up of, unrestricted. You get to create the colors and shades, textures and shapes.

You get to drive the tale, the narrative, the way.

You get to be the author of your ever developing self and that authorship lends a sense of power to the individual.

You can be whatever you want to be, whoever you want to be, wherever you want to be, if you can just let it occupy your mind.

Thank you, wise man, for your exercise in couch philosophy and the inspiration to imagine a world of possibility right here from mine.

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this piece was first published on medium: how peculiar a preface, how a false maxim can one-up the truth.