Still Busy In Wonder

I’ve always been told that our thoughts become things. The idea is that if your thoughts are negative then your life becomes negative, the boomerang effect, or maybe better described as psychological karma. As a result we often hear that if we are to get positive feedback from the universe we must send out positive vibrations. Which in itself is a nice idea, it lends to the idea of meritocracy and as a by product you could argue that it props up the ideals of capitalism; by suggesting that even nature works in a system that benefits those who are perceived to have poured the most into that system.

In a statistical sense it does make sense, generally speaking middle class people have a more positive outlook on society, the glass half full types. But are their lives positive because their thoughts are positive? Or alternatively are their thoughts positive because their lives are positive? In a world that is designed to keep a certain percentage of the population marginalised is it possible that some of those people may have been trained to have negative thoughts.

It is said that the child is the blank canvas, the canvas that is being carefully painted, only to finish simultaneously as we take our final breath. But while all canvases come equal, the tools and the artist assigned to each canvas vary in quality. We are products of experience, whether those experiences are positive or negative they mild us. Thoughts do not become things, thinking is the process that takes place as a result of things happening.

For example, there exist a school of thought that believes that children born at the end of the school year face a disadvantage to those born at the begininning of the school year based on age. In such a situation two children could be almost a year apart, which means that one child has been experiencing the world for a year longer than the other. As a result they are physically stronger, have read more times than the younger child, which as a result gives them the appearance of being smarter than the other child. If that child is then placed into a higher class set than the other child, he is then given better tools to succeed and as a result a gap in knowledge is created, one that may not have existed if both children were given the same opportunity.

In many ways life is a race. A race that many people have not been given the proper tools to equally compete in. When you take into account all of the minor disavantages that face some of us face it becomes clear someone may be 50 steps ahead of you by the time you apply for university, but is that because they’re smarter than you? The culmination of those disadvantages results in one huge step back, the creation of a gap that ultimately can’t and was never intended to be bridged.

I wonder if it’s ever possible to become a self fulfilling prophecy? I wonder if we as individuals could ever wield the power to create destiny, to control thought and action simultaneously? The world is not designed in a way that affords us the opportunity to control our physical or mental world. We are the sum of pain, results of our experience. The children that were taught we could be anything we put our minds too, but that’s a fallacy. We are dreamer generation that won’t ever wake up, the result of a lack of physical opportunity not mental ability.