After Clarence died a few weeks ago, I watched a bunch of Bruce Springsteen videos, reliving my appreciation for the band and their music. Problem was, for several days I could not get the songs out of my head. I got really sick of it. It’s not that the message of Badlands, Born to Run, and Thunder Road are bad, it’s just that once the videos are over, I’d like to think of something else.
But it doesn’t work that way.
The inside of my head is an art gallery, and what I expose myself to gets hung on my mind’s wall. The longer I expose myself to it and dwell on it, the longer it hangs in the gallery. I really got tired of those paintings and wanted to take them down, but couldn’t.
The gallery is always open and something is always on those walls. All you can do is expose yourself to something new and dwell on that, so the old art is replaced with the new.
This can end up really working to your advantage – just dwell on the thing you want to be influenced by most, and the gallery will take care of the rest.
