He had kept most of his thoughts bottled up in a jar made of an impregnable material called duties, topped with a lid called responsibilities. For long the jar remained in a dusty old corner of existence, till one day a weird smell started coming from it. Tentatively, he tried to unscrew the lid, which was much more difficult than closing it had been. A smell that was familiar yet strange, began wafting out of the jar.
His thoughts had become pickled! As he gingerly picked one out he remembered this one — it was one from his school days, and it was a promise he had thought of when he passed high school, that he would keep in touch with his closest friends and talk with them every single week. And it had now been a decade since he had called any single one amongst them.
Wait a minute — this picked one still gave off the smell of wild honey. He remembered this smell, his first crush, with her perfume, her smile. At one time her thoughts had monopolised his brain, making himcertain they would be together forever, and now he had trouble even remembering her face.
He picked at some tattered thoughts…they were those ideals which he had long forsaken on the altar of the career. The fiery thoughts of independence, to have his own business had long been extinguished by the needs of family. Forget starting his own business, he was scared to start his own work without taking approval from the boss.
He tried closing the lid, bit it felt impossible. The pickled thoughts were growing in size, oozing out of the jar, with a life of their own. He tried to catch them all but the thoughts kept running away from him, swirling around him. Then, they all encircled him, looking at him accusingly, till he could see them in the eyes no more.
He had let down his own thoughts, and that made him a lesser human being than the one he was born to be. That’s when he decided, that he would have to be the man his thoughts had thought him to be.
An idea is at once both a collection as well as a distillation of thoughts. A good thought which does not translate into a deed is a waste. For that to happen, a singular thought must join others to coalesce into a meaningful idea. Not every thought will make it into an idea- at times they are like candles, which burn out for a while and die, and some are like fireflies which can illuminate an entire forest.
The world is now nothing but an arena for competing ideas — there is no philosophy, no ideal, no moral, without these coalesced thoughts. If we ignore our thoughts, they never become an idea, and if we don’t act on ideas, we kill it — its a double homicide.
Thoughts are the fastest things in the world — much faster than light. They have a mind of their own, choosing whose mind to appear in. If you have been chosen by them, and an idea has formed in your mind, it is your duty to take it to fruition.
Yet the biggest idea, from which all thoughts are born, are the framework we must all keep as our one truth — empathy. This superpower is the most relevant yet most ignored of all human abilities. Evolution is not opposable thumbs, but the capacity to place oneself in the mind of another being, to imagine their reaction, to feel their pain & suffering.
He thus takes out his pen and thanks the thoughts which have deemed him worthy enough to form the idea of a new world, an empathetic world — and he takes the most important step towards this goal — he now writes.