The Day My Buddha Burned - Part Two

Here I am holding my big sisters' hands in the early 70's.

This is part of a novella. Here is the first exert of The Day My Buddha Burned 

Ideas like Building Blocks

We are like small children with coloured building blocks.  We sit there totally absorbed in placing one block on top of another and either because we haven’t placed our blocks well, or because we get fed up, the blocks fall and quite happily, and without questioning what we are doing at all, we rebuild. We often rebuild without seeming to learn anything from the last structure we built. We build without any view to an end point. We build until it collapses.

And then we start again.

The coloured building blocks are ideas and belief systems we individually construct within the walls of our minds.

We are all born with the building blocks before us. Some of the ideas we build are based on the blueprints handed down to us by our family, friends, society, culture and country, and others are drawn up in direct consequence of what we have perceived as positive/protective responses to life’s events.

Deconstruction and re-planning occur in the teenage years when our hormones coupled with an expansion of perception create some of the biggest conscious changes we have thus far been aware of. Many people don’t change their mental landscape again until their retirement.

However, for others, we have been forced by personality or circumstance, to abandon ideas housed within our minds and perhaps to put up temporary structures to aid us in different moments in life. Perhaps some of us can even be called nomads, resting in easily constructed rooms for comfort and being able to adapt according to the changing seasons.

I’ve written down some of the changes to my thinking in the past 40 years.