Take a moment and tell me
the next thought
that pops into your head.
When you think about this thought,
the thought you think without thinking —
scans of our brains have shown
that this is not even close to
our first thought at all —
you only notice what
get’s noticed.

Like a anxious child
on her way up to a big stage,
our thought travels through
labyrinthian halls of mental mirrors,
layers upon layers of promise and threat,
yearning and fear
before it imprints itself upon our soft cortex —
before we finally adopt it
as our own.

It is both a funny and sad fact
that we stroll through our entires lives
with other people's thoughts
inside our heads — and worse,
that we convince ourselves
these thoughts are our own.
This drunken happy hour of
ideas, opinions, predictions, zingers —
like uninvited dinner guests,
we let them become the
life of our party.

But what if we take
a closer look,
closer even still —
we might make out our own
first thought
hiding, crouching
deep down there
in the fertile soil,
locked behind that mossy
little door we’ve bolted shut so
many years ago.

The doorway to our freedom.

Oh, all those precious years
listening to those who had
nothing to say.
If we could only take our
first brave step back again,
back to that little door
and confront those
painful questions
we’ve been too afraid to ask.

If we can only summon the strength to
crack that lock wide open again,
we can speak our mind truthfully
like back when we were no taller
than that door itself,
gamboling through our budding lives
with no one’s thoughts
but our own.