Yet again, I find myself with no topic in mind to write about, but I feel this addiction building that I have to write something and share it online. This is pretty dangerous if my goal is to build this into a popular blog, because if I write just because I can’t not write, quality of my posts will suffer. Thankfully, I don’t have many aspirations for my blog, hence I can afford to write just for the heck of it.
I want to write today about some recent experiences with a concept that has several names – mind over matter, thoughts become things, the law of attraction – to name a few. While I have had many experiences like this, the ones I will write about today happened in quick succession – within 48 hours. 48 hours during the end of my Chennai visit that I wrote about in an earlier post, so it’s possible that my spiritual energy was pretty high at that time (I say this with full awareness that I may be considered high for saying this). So, let’s start.
I was in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, in a spiritual Ashram. I had spent nearly a week there and was set to leave for home in a couple of days. There was a person there who I had promised I’d meet when I reached Chennai, but I had completely forgotten about it. That day, I bumped into him, and he was not happy about me not meeting him. I too was flabbergasted upon realizing that I had forgotten to meet him, and blurted out, “I totally meant to meet you, but my flight was delayed!”. It was a lie, but once it just came out of my mouth (so you see, it was its fault really), I had to stick with it. I said at least a couple of times more throughout the entire conversation, “my flight was delayed”. The embarrassing encounter was finally over, and a while later I forgot all about it.
The day came when I was supposed to leave. Just as I was finishing up packing, my airline informed me through a SMS that my flight was delayed. To such an extent that I’d miss my connecting train. Now that’s some delay! I had to change the entire reservation, and instead of leaving at 4pm that day, I left Chennai at 8am the next day – the flight I had changed the reservation to, was delayed. Instead of a train, this time I had booked another flight for the final leg of the journey. You guessed it, it too was delayed. So after I repeated thrice, “my flight was delayed”, I encountered three delayed flights. Or, in other words, I encountered no on-time flights!
So there’s the delayed flight story. Be very careful about what you say, even when those darn evil words just come flying out of your mouth, with no fault of your own.
Next, we come to the tube-like-airplane-transport-thing story. I don’t know what it’s called – the gallery type thing that they attach to the airplane when you land, so you can walk to the arrival area. Wait, let me google it. Okay, it’s called a jet bridge. It’s also called a portal, but it is too cool a name for something so earthly. Anyway, on with the story. I had many times landed and used a jet bridge to move from the aircraft to the terminal. But never had I entered an aircraft through a jet bridge. So one day before I was to take off from Chennai, I was wondering if airlines also transfer passengers to the aircraft through a (okay) portal. Next morning, after scores of air travels, for the first time in my life, I entered an aircraft through a jet bridge. What an experience! Not the bridge, the manifestation of my thought. I thought about it the previous day for a couple of minutes, then forgot all about it, and there it was. Thoughts become things.
The next story is more interesting, I promise. Another “first time in my life” experience, just hours after I was thinking and talking about it. As I told you earlier, all my flights were getting delayed. That meant a lot of waiting time at airports. I and my parents were pretty bored, so we were talking about random stuff. Suddenly, I complained to my mom, “why don’t we ever see a celebrity in an airport?” I had, of course, seen celebrity sightings photographs, and many of them were at airports. Mom said, “that’s because they’re brought in and out of airports through special entrances and exits. It’d become so chaotic here if Shah Rukh Khan just appears all of a sudden.” I agreed with her, and said, “Mom, I’ll be perfectly fine with a small non-chaos-inducing TV actor.” At this point mom got bored of the topic and went back to her newspaper. All this happened at Chennai airport.
We were at New Delhi airport, about 4 hours after the above conversation had taken place. Our flight to Allahabad was delayed by an hour, and we were just strolling around. Suddenly a familiar face caught my eye. He was an elderly looking man, with large beard, and was talking animatedly to the gentleman sitting beside him. I recognized him instantly – he was the actor who played something in that TV serial! By that time mom had seen him too. She, being the TV buff she denies being, knew all about him. His name is Anupam Shyam, and he played Thakur Sajjan Singh in a TV soap that is no longer in telecast called Pratigya. This was the first time that I ever bumped into a celebrity, major or minor.
So there you go – three instances, all within a span of forty-eight hours, that reminded me once more that thoughts in fact do become things. There are only two things that I can think of that are common in all the three cases –
1. I thought.
2. I forgot.
What I learned from this is that, first, think only of those things that you want, that are positive, that make you joyful. Because whatever you think might very well happen. Second, don’t worry about it. I was not making myself crazy looking for celebrities. I had forgotten all about it and was focusing on other things. But then, I was traveling – I had to take care of my luggage, make sure I was near the right gate, there were new people, new experiences – my mind was occupied. Letting go is more difficult when it comes to regular life in a routine. But as they say, practice makes a man perfect.
If you are reading this, please share your own “thoughts become things” experiences.
Love,
Suyash.
Life of Moi 