Change your mind

Sometimes I get completely lost in a phrase that I have used all my life. Like, ‘I have seen better days’. They reckon Shakespeare invented that one. And wild goose chase. And foregone conclusion. Did you know you can just make up phrases and then people say them for centuries without even knowing it? The one that got me started was: I have changed my mind. Imagine thinking that up. I had a mind that thought this. As a result of some more information or a change of some kind, it is now changed. Like a cool breeze on a hot day. The entire environment is altered.

Public Service Announcement: changing your mind gets harder as you get you older. Try it some time. A cool breeze can make all the difference.

There’s a café that has opened near where I live and I saw the couple inside it having done all the setting up. There was a bottle of champagne between them and their shiny faces were cheersing each other. Cheersing is a word. I just invented that. You can do that apparently. Anyway, I realised I was witnessing a moment that was a result of a string of decisions. Maybe we could run our own café? Maybe that place on the corner would be good? What if we painted one of the walls a cheeky purple colour? These are adult people who have changed something in lives and stand at the start of something that one day might end in another change of some kind but will pretty soon become their new normal.

Someone corrected me a while back. We were talking about trigger warnings and I made an off-hand comment when she told me trigger warnings were being applied to law courses. ‘From memory’, I said, ‘criminal law would have be trigger warned out the wazoo!’ (Who invented ‘wazoo’? Why did we all run with it? Good on us). Now, when I was told by this person that actually that was ridiculous, I felt the desire to defend myself rise within me but attempted to swallow it down while this person explained it to me. You see, I’ve been the explainer. I’ve explained things like this to older, more conservative people who were raised in a different time. Now here I was being explained to. It was insensitive of me. I was ignorant. These things were being implied about me. Outrageous! But what this person explained was that trigger warnings are just a warning. It’s a sentence written down at the start of something that says, ‘This bleak and confronting material might come right at the part of you that’s feeling vulnerable’. And it’s a sentence. So what do you, who is not feeling vulnerable, care? How is that skin off your nose? (This phrase, I just discovered, originated from boxing). Also: maybe you haven’t felt the need for it and had to suffer through horrible legal cases about the worst excesses of society but why should other people not be warned if we know this is a way of looking after them emotionally? So I was wrong, I decided, about the trigger warning thing, and I felt like a bit of an idiot to be honest. Like the kid in the class who got busted being unkind about someone and the entire class is looking at you and the teacher has made it perfectly clear this is not acceptable.

Changing up your living space is the best. Move the furniture about. Start a new page in a journal.

There’s something about new socks isn’t there. New socks and new spreads. Like vegemite and peanut butter. If you’re the first to open one of those, you just know the universe is smiling at you. Good morning, it’s saying. All the best.

Sometimes recycled and old things are the absolute business, but changing your mind, altering your day, experiencing the newness of something, it’s as significant and insignificant as a cool breeze.

Give it a go. Walk to a different place. Listen to a song you’ve never heard. Buy some vegemite. Change your mind. Listen to someone else’s stories and don’t bop them on the nose because they reveal what you didn’t know or how badly you’ve behaved. Be big enough to change your mind. This advice doesn’t apply universally, obviously. Don’t listen to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Like me. Don’t listen to me. Unless I’ve changed your mind.