The human mind

By Francis Ewherido

It was one of those days in the University of Nigeria, Jackson Building (Mass Communication Department), to be specific. One of my schoolmates had been getting under my skin. He had this annoying habit of patting guys on the bum. On this day, I anticipated he was going to do it again and beat off his hand as it was moving towards my backside.

Back in my room, after lunch, as I recounted all that had happened so far that day; I remembered the incident and got very angry. I said to myself, “the movement of my arm should have been more forceful. In fact, I should have used my elbow to break his forearm (ulna, radius or both).” Then I forcefully moved my arm backward to demonstrate how I should have reacted and my much treasured wristwatch flew off my wrist and hit the wall. By the time I retrieved it, the screen was gone.

The human mind: good, creative, ingenious and barrier-breaking, the cradle of many great things. The human mind: evil, vengeful, secretive, unfathomable, destroyer of relationships (including marriages) and many great things. I just destroyed a very expensive wristwatch, a gift from my brother, which I could not have afforded as a student. Why did I start recreating and getting angry over what had happened and gone forever? The human mind.

On two occasions here, we have written about assumption, one of the destructive tendencies of the human mind. But here is something far greater than assumption, positively and negatively. Last Wednesday’s Vanguard, page 7, reported the case of an estranged housewife who allegedly hired assassins to kill her husband of 14 years. The plot failed and she was arrested. Now she is singing that she only sent the thugs to beat up her husband, though the thugs insist she sent them to kill him. But why will you even send thugs to beat up your spouse? The human mind.

A couple do the usual couple’s stuff when they get back from work: laugh, discuss, watch TV together and crown it with some tangling before a good sleep. They wake up the next morning and one party is moody, aggressive, or even asking for a divorce. The other spouse is at a loss; “where did I go wrong?” “We went to bed on a good note last night; what is going on here?”

“Witches and wizards are at work.” “This is the work of my enemies.” “That woman who has been angling to appropriate my husband has finally succeeded.” Do not let your own mind run riot. It probably has nothing to do with all the aforementioned; the human mind is at work. Sometimes after you slept off, he/she woke up, processed the events of the past day or even the entire marriage in his/her mind and came up with decisions independent of you.

The human mind is amazing and complex; it makes mountains out of molehills. In a marriage, the main issues become how a spouse litters the room with his/her shoes and socks, how he/she squeezes the toothpaste from the middle instead of the base, how he/she snores heavily and disturbs your sleep or rolls all over and disrupts your sleep.

Wait a minute, if these are driving you up the wall, why don’t you discuss and resolve things amicably. For example, like sleeping in separate rooms, in extreme cases, to sort out the problem of snoring? No, one spouse prefers to process the situation in his/her mind and take decisions independent of the other spouse. When you shave your spouse’s head in his/her absence, what outcome do you expect?

Again, in your mind you have processed the way your spouse chews food while eating, walks, talks, sleeps( one woman actually gave her husband a slap across the face to wake him up for embarrassing her by snoring in a public vehicle when they were travelling) and you have developed a tremendous disdain for him/her.

You are processing everything in your mind independent of the victim, sorry, your spouse. When you take your rash, one-sided decisions and your bewildered spouse brings in an intermediary to try and douse the inferno emanating from your actions, your mind becomes a stumbling block in the form of ego, self-righteousness, etc.

We must not let our minds confuse us. In marriage every issue cannot be core or big. Choose those which are fundamental to you and let your spouse be aware of them. Learn to live with the others. Now, we cannot accurately say what is small and what is fundamental because one man’s mountain is another’s molehill.

A man threw out his wife from their first floor apartment window because she changed the TV channel from a soccer channel during a world cup football match. Other men will plead with their wives or simply walk away and watch the match in the second TV in another part of the house. Some will go to the pub nearby and continue watching the match. But for many people, some small issues, which can become big issues, are absence of “thank you,” “please,” “I am sorry,” “how was your day,” etc.

The human mind has been complicated since God gave man the freedom of choice. I suspect God was not surprised when Adam and Eve elected to eat the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:6). I also suspect God was not surprised when Cain killed Abel (Gen. 4:8). Even though the Bible records that God has been occasionally angry with and disappointed in man, nothing man did and still does has surprised God since creation.  ”The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Jeremiah’s harsh description of the mind notwithstanding, God has given us the freedom of choice. Choose a good heart for your marriage. The mind Jeremiah described above has no place in a happy and successful marriage. Lastly, it is not every upheaval that happens in your marriage (or other relationships) that you blame yourself for. Some things have nothing to do with you; they are just beyond you. That is partly why marriage is divine. Take that which is beyond you to Him who is the author of marriage.

 

The post The human mind appeared first on Vanguard News.

from Vanguard News http://ift.tt/2e934qU
via IFTTT