Imagine a house. This house, as I'm sure by now you've figured out, is a metaphor for your mind.
Good work.
Your house starts out pretty much like you would imagine it to. Walls, ceiling, floors, doors, windows. Over time, people come in and put furniture in the house, slowly. Perhaps it's more like bringing in roughly furniture-shaped items, and then assembling them once the pieces are inside. Something like that.
Your house is special in that it can travel through space and time, and pick up things along the way. By 'things', I mean things. In this case, people are also things. (Some people might heartily disagree. Those people can wait outside.) Some examples of things you can pick up:
- Artwork, music albums, sculptures, books.
- Cooking utensils, Christmas lights, televisions, video games.
- Gandhi, Harry Potter, your neighbors, Jesus.
- existentialism, nihilism, idealism, perfectionism.
- Guns, feathers, sofas, fire.
This is just an assortment. Many things, and many categories of things, have been left out. Oh, and one more thing -- you don't choose what goes in your house, other people do that for you. You only get to choose where to place your house: in what location, around which people, etc. They do the rest. They fill up your house.
So, you'll get new things. Daily, actually. Broccoli here, from when you hung out around that farm for a while. Power drill there, from landing your house at a construction site. Socks, then exercise equipment, then candles, all from different places. This is the collection of things that you have to work with. If you want to fly to New York to build a bridge from Harlem to Broadway so actors and jazz musicians can mingle, you have to do it with the things already in your house. What if you can't quite do that? Well then, hopefully you have the resources in your house to get what you need. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck, I guess.
Suddenly, you need something in a hurry. You need it, like, NOW. If it's something specific, you better hope that it's somewhere you've seen it recently. Otherwise, you could be digging for a while in all the wrong places -- you may never find it.
Let's say you need to just throw something overboard, because your house is floating under a canopy of balloons and you're getting too close to the ground. Or perhaps your friend is outside, underneath your flying balloon house, and you want something quick to toss to them, as a sort of wedding gift because he or she just got married. (Hypothetically.) Well, you'll probably grab something around you, something that you've seen or used recently. All those things in your house that you actually do things with. Things, things, things. Hope that it's something good, or you could embarrass yourself. You could hurt them. It's dangerous business throwing random things out your front door.
This has consequences. Let's say you collect guns. You get guns for your house by hanging out around military bases, and around war zones, and around gun shops, from every nation and culture and price range. "You have a violent house," someone says. "Nonsense," you say. "I can be completely non-violent with my house: watch." Then, you proceed to search through a couple drawers and pull out a book of crossword puzzles that someone randomly gave you when you landed your house in a cafeteria. "It's all what you do with it," you say as you sit down to fill in two or three words, to prove how non-violent you are.
But what if, let's say, hypothetically, a friend randomly comes into your house and tinkers with something random -- chances are, that thing in your house is a gun. If your house were full of baroque sheet music, the chances of them accidentally shooting themselves would be much smaller. Your collections of things make a difference.
If your mental dictionary is full of text abbreviations, Twitter hashtags, and celebrity names, a sad writer you will be. Where in these things lies your power of expression, the beautiful and artistic creation of language that can move and shake and scream?
Nowhere. What a terrible thing to read.
Such it is with your mental catalog of ideas, of stories, of places and feelings and ways to love. How will you navigate a complex life without a breadth of knowledge at your ready command? How can you solve a multitude of problems if you have only seen one solution?
The point is, everything that you come into contact with influences you. Hanging out with bank robbers 24/7 will influence you, in some way. Perhaps not to rob banks, but it will nevertheless have an influence -- perhaps not to rob banks, because you see what it does to them. Perhaps part of that influence is winding up in jail. Is that the influence you want to expose yourself to? Having deep conversations with people of opposing ideologies will influence you. It may not change what you believe -- but it will influence you. You will learn new things, see things from other perspectives, shift your ideas and views. For myself: I would gladly take that influence, while gladly avoiding the influence of the bank robbers. It's up to each of us to decide which influences we want to affect our lives, and which we don't.
...or is it?
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