Subliminal Chit Chat

At the risk of dating myself, let’s share a popular marketing line from television for a minute.  There are many to choose from.  Today, we will choose, “without the Dream Whip on it, it just isn’t dessert!”  Marketing is clever & do you sometimes find that the commercials out there that stick in your mind tend to be the ones that you were not amused with in the first place?  Even as a kid, I did not believe that something sold in a box was going to turn something that was yummy already into something spectacular.  Also, I sure did not fall for the idea that if I was about to eat something that I already did not like, that any whip cream was going to make the dish any less undesirable.

Have most of us fallen prey to the odd marketing frenzy or stereotype or cliché?  We all get to answer that for ourselves.  I am certain that I have bought into numerous marketing pitches, stereotypes & clichés over the years.  Over time though, my experience has been that I have developed more of a filter for these particular things.  The reason that I have “installed” a mental filter for myself is that I want to be the one feeding my own mind.  Most of us would agree that we do not invite thoughts into our minds that do not meet our best needs on purpose.  Sometimes when we are making use of our “filter” we may find that we will want to keep some forms of clichés since some may serve us well.  A couple of gems from childhood include:  “if everyone is jumping off a cliff, it doesn’t mean that you should too” & “if you don’t have something nice to say, then say nothing at all.”  Those ones I truly adopted decades ago & they are great travelling companions in life.

Would it seem reasonable to say that most folks have given in to the imagery-laden act of “jumping off the cliff like others” or finding that an unkind statement has been inadvertently uttered at times?  We are human after all.  Even when we try our very best to avoid both of these pitfalls, sometimes we fall into them.  We then learn from these experiences & get to choose with more reserve to conquer these tendencies.  It may be a genuine work in progress.  It is easy to get pulled into “group hype” & it takes courage to separate oneself from either an action or a series of words that will not serve our best selves.  The great news is that we get to wake up each day & make a different decision that will grow our best selves in the process. 

Whether we have diabetes or a 365 challenge, we don’t have to believe the marketing, clichés or “group speak” on any given day unless it serves to grow us to be better selves.  When it comes to groups, we can find that some group dynamics lift folks up & other environments pull people down.  We get to discern the groups to participate in.  If a group is requiring us to do or say something that is hurtful to our human family or to us, then we have a pretty easy decision to make about continuing with our participation.  When we are part of a group that is promoting through action & words messages of helping us as well as our human family to grow in goodness, then we have a treasure.  Discernment, courage, and boldness may be the best friends that we can have while making our decisions about groups that we are prepared to participate within.

In my mind, quotes are gems of wisdom.  I absolutely love quotes!  It was Anatole France that said, “If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”  If we are driving & we see that there is a pothole ahead of us on the road, what do we do?  Surely, we choose to drive around the pothole because we do not want to damage our cars.  Are our minds, hearts & spirits of more value to us than our cars?  I sure hope so. 

My heart’s hope for you is that you build a filter of sorts for yourself too.  May this filter act as a steadfast tool for screening what is best for you & what is not.

Smiles, Saundie :)