Free Your Mind

When I think about what happened as a result of my coma, about my TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury...or whatever you want to call it, I think of two things in particular. One of these, I believe, is the name of an album done by the comedy group Monty Python, and the other is a line from the Matrix.

It was Monty Python who said, "Everything you know is wrong."  I'm not referring to what a person with a brain injury would know.  I'm talking about everyone else.  Despite what a person with a brain injury may think, there is an awful lot about what they know that is right and good.  They just have to trust themselves.  The trust is missing...the trusting of your own thoughts, of your senses, and your perceptions.  Trusting them will begin to lead you in the right direction. 

That leads us to what everyone else thinks.  For the most part...that is what is wrong...what everyone else thinks.  People are so stuck in their way of thinking and behaving that they can't step aside and see what is really going on.  Someone who has suffered a traumatic brain injury has a new window into life.  A new way to look at things that have always been.  Now they may not look like they should be the way they always have been, and they make themselves wrong for thinking this.  Truth is...they could be right.

In the Matrix, that bald dude said to Neo, "Free your mind."  This is what allowed him to jump from rooftop to rooftop.  Jumping like that was something that didn't look possible, and the fear, or the thought of not being able to do it was exactly what made it impossible.  It was Neo's perception of jumping that made it impossible.  Much of head injury is about perception, and not trusting.  Finding the inner strength to trust yourself is what will disprove conventional wisdom.  Conventional wisdom is good for those stuffed into a convention center, following the party line.  For those of us on the edge, living what may be a new and unanticipated  life, there is no conventional wisdom.  There is only the truth as we know it.

So remember....

Everything you know is wrong.

Free your mind.

Comments

[The light of your life]

I think that bald dudes name is Morpheus. For future reference. :)