You can’t control your thoughts or fears. You can’t control your actions, so you see a therapist and take their prescribed advice and pharmaceuticals, because you believe without their perspective on you, you’re just a lump of clay in the corner.
No wheel.
No drivetrain.
Waiting for someone to tell you what to do, what to take, what to say, to rewire your brain by example, until you become nothing but a blob, dependent on the hands that shape you.
But your mind is like your skin, full of pores. Whatever touches it, soaks in.
Be careful what you put on it, because what seeps in becomes part of you. Good and bad.
The thoughts, the noise, the media and medicine, the bad advice, all enter the bloodstream of your being.
And be careful of those opinions of others, who use the opinions of others, who used the opinions of failed others, to guide your hand.
This is the problem with society: the weak don’t fight to stand upright. They follow the gravy train of kibble.
They’d rather fly a kite than face the weight of gravity.
But nothing worth anything comes easily.
You can’t wake up and say, “Ice cream for breakfast, cake for lunch.” When even the simplest forms of life know it’s bad.
You have to master your own domain, your body, your mind, your emotions: anger and tenderness, integrity and empathy, envy, jealousy, and hierarchy.
Because the battle isn’t out there.
It’s in you.
In the clay before the wheel turns, in the mind before the thought forms.
Guard what enters.
Shape what remains.
And when you finally take form, let it be by your own hands. For impatience comes at an expense.
When you see the barbed wire, trust your gut and don’t talk yourself out of what it is.
c 2025 Chu The Cud
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Chu The Cud 