The art of mindlessness

I was visiting a close friend last week. While chatting, her husband said, “Hey! Show Sharda the book you bought me.”

She went into the study and brought out a tiny, square-shaped book, the sort that Hallmark sells, with little sayings.

"I was so excited about this book when I saw it. I said, 'Wow! He would be so happy to get this. It will come in handy for his work,’" she said (they are both psychologists).

The cover design was similar to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now except this one was entitled The Power of Then. I myself was intrigued, thinking that it was probably a follow up from Tolle’s book.

"Hmm, oh wow!" I said sharing her excitement.

I checked the author, wondering whether it was a Tolle book or someone else. And then I saw it – The Power of Then: The Path to Mindlessness by Dr Kuda Wooda Shuda, DBs.

By then we were all laughing.

“This is so cool! It’s a parody!" I exclaimed.

"Oh yeah! And when Nisha (not her actual name) came home and gave it to me I thought, it was so interesting that it was a comical take," her husband said laughing hysterically.

"It was so funny," he continued, "She looked so surprised when I said, ‘Oh! This is cool. A funny book,' and she was like, 'What? What you mean?' She hadn’t realised that it was a parody!!"

Nisha chimed in: "I was so fooled. It's like you're always on auto-pilot that you don’t even stop to read. I just saw the cover and the big bold Power of Then and I got excited and thought it would be such a neat small thing for him to carry around and use."

Over the course of the week I had been having sporadic conversations with people and, interestingly enough, this mindlessness seemed a common thread. One young lady in her late 20s said, "We are a failed nation as far as I am concerned. People talking about, 'Fix the crime in Laventille. Fix the crime in Laventille,' and they not even realising that the whole country is one big Laventille. It’s mad! People just going into stores in broad daylight, shooting people, robbing people. All this madness and people still talking about freakin’ Laventille!"

Another, a store owner speaking about customer service said, "In this country, people want good customer service right. We pride ourselves on that, but then one lady comes in this week and was rude because she felt that we were taking longer than she expected.

"She stood there commenting about how we talking more than we working, I pulled the surveillance after she left and timed when we actually started the job. It had only taken twelve minutes. Twelve minutes! While the copier was running off her copies I was answering some questions from another customer. But she had no patience and made her comment.

"So I said to her, ‘Well since our service is poor, I don’t think your money is worth it.' I returned her money and gave her her stuff free. But then, oh! I have attitude. And, you know, the ironic thing is, right after she left, this guy walks in and shouts ‘I have come here because of your continued excellent service!’ I couldn’t help but laugh because just before that was this person and her impatience railing up about poor service when we always try to put customer needs first.

"In this country, we don’t have a culture of praising people’s good work. All we ever do is cut down, cut down.’

"Ah well," I replied (I also note that a story has two sides and perhaps our store owner’s manner of speaking may have indeed been haughty, who knows. Point is however, yes, we do have a crab in a barrel culture).

On these two counts, we encounter a sort of mindlessness at work. Despite the crime all over the country, for some reason our focal point is still on Laventille and gangs as the pinnacle of crime. Or that customer service is so bad all over that even if a store usually provides excellent service, at the first sign of the familiar bad service, we have a knee jerk response and we criticise. This attitude motivates our voting patterns, the way we think about and stereotype each other in too many instances. In an imagination where history seems unchanged and unchangeable, we develop habits of thinking that cultivate a mindlessness that severely threatens our social responsibility and ability to enact positive change. So this week, I plan first to focus on my diaphragm, get reacquainted with it so that at some point, I shall begin once again to breathe naturally. Hoping that our country finds its own diaphragm soon.