What Kind Of Thinker Are You?
Are You An Outside-The-Lines Or Inside-The-Lines
Thinker?
When I drive to work in the morning, I don’t think about
the waxy buildup on my kitchen floor. I think about the tarp in the pickup
truck in front of me and how there might be a body underneath it.
Should
I take a picture of the license plate and send it to the FBI tip line?
But then I remember the ’80s and my
mistaken sighting of the Son of Sam on a Metro-North
train. The person of interest wore a rumpled suit and a creepy grin that
screamed: “It’s him!”— It wasn’t! — I found out weeks
later after filing a police report.
In
those days, my thoughts often drifted far outside the lines. Though, I was
young enough to be excused for mistaking a bedraggled commuter for a serial
killer.
Now,
I have better control of my thoughts and tell them when not to venture into the
dark place beneath the tarp. “Stand down,” I say aloud, knowing that anyone who
sees me won’t think I’m crazy because of the Bluetooth earpiece defense.
I
instruct my thoughts to move on to something less sinister, like the frozen
food section at the Stop & Shop where the elderly stop to talk to me. But
my thoughts veer down another aisle instead. And I think about how the people
who cut me off with their cars in the parking lot are the same people who cut
me off with their carts at the produce stand.
“How come my brain doesn’t work like yours?” you ask.
“Why can’t I think outside-the-lines as you do?”
Well,
my inside-the-lines thinking friend. Your brain might not come with
instructions, but it does come with a creative function. Remember what Glinda
the Good Witch told Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz? — “You had the ability to get
home all along.”
Well,
you had the ability to think outside-the-lines all along.
Turn
off the practical humdrum switch in your brain, comforted by lists, numbers and
repetitive actions that can cause carpal-tunnel-brain syndrome, and let your
thoughts stretch your imagination.
While
driving to work in the morning, think about that weird clerk at the pharmacy
with the crooked nose and pink-framed glasses. Was she human or goblin?
Start
to play the “what if” game that outside-the-lines thinkers love to play. What
if the clerk got zapped by a gamma ray before filling your prescription, and
turned into a goblin?
What
if aliens captured your husband while he was in the shower and that’s really a
doppelgänger husband tucking his shirt into his pants?
Yes,
you can be as weird as I am.
But
use your new powers sparingly at first. Some inside-the-line thinkers have been
known to overuse their creative powers before becoming familiar with them. They
end up in a white padded room obsessing over that word problem they got wrong
in sixth-grade math:
“What time will a train arrive in Los Angeles if it
leaves New York City at 3 a.m., stops in Chicago for an hour while you spend
thirty minutes at a pizzeria buried in an avalanche of extra cheese?”
Blurg!
Gurgle! Splurg! Numbers, they’re so calculating; they try to disguise
themselves as words but can’t hide their stubby little digits.
That’s
why on days when things don’t add up, I stop trying to figure them out and
start playing the “what if” game, an outside-the-lines getaway from the “oh,
no!” moments in life.
Lauren Salkin
https://medium.com/publishous/what-kind-of-thinker-are-you-cbb82f845deb
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