What if our minds were born anew?
What if we woke up one morning and found nothing in our minds of what we knew yesterday?
No old fears, no preconceived judgments, no self-image we had drawn for ourselves and then spent years trying to live up to. No inherited ideas we mistook for our own, and no inner voice telling us: this is right, this is wrong, this is possible, this is impossible.
What if our minds were born anew?
Perhaps the first shock would be that we would not recognize ourselves as we thought we were. We do not live only in our bodies; we live within a vast archive of memory. A word spoken in our childhood, a betrayal that made us more cautious, a love that made us more expectant, and an old fear that grew with us until it became part of our personalities.
Then we grow up and say, “This is who I am.” But are we truly like this, or have we become like this?
There is a great difference between the two.
We may spend our lives defending traits we never chose in the first place. We say we do not trust anyone, when perhaps someone taught us that trust is painful. We say we do not need love, when perhaps love was the very thing we needed most, but we did not receive it in time.
Therefore, the rebirth of the mind does not mean losing memory, but re-examining what it has done to us. How many ideas do we carry simply because they were told to us too early, leaving us no chance to question them?
Science of Nature
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We are born as children, and then the world begins writing within us: family, school, society, friends, experiences, losses, success, and failure. After years, we open the book and read it, then call it: my personality.
But what if some of what we call personality is merely the traces of people and events that passed through our lives?
Perhaps the hardest thing a person can do is to let go of something old that they believed to be the truth.
Imagine if we returned to some of the situations that broke us, using our current minds. Perhaps we would have left earlier, or forgiven, or, even better, we would have forgiven ourselves.
We often punish older versions of ourselves with ideas we acquired later. We blame the child for not knowing what the man knows, and we hold the young person accountable for lacking wisdom they did not possess at the time.
Perhaps true maturity is understanding those versions and saying to them: “You knew less, you were more afraid, and yet you tried.”
What if our minds were born anew?
Perhaps we would discover that freedom is not about doing what we want, but knowing why we want what we want.
Is this truly my desire, or have I learned to desire it?
Do I want success, or the image it gives me in the eyes of others? Do I want this person, or do I simply want to feel loved?
The older a person becomes, the more they realize that the most dangerous things are not only ignorance, but what they believed they knew.
A mind born anew does not become more knowledgeable, but more expansive. It learns to say, “I do not know,” and to admit mistakes without its self-image shaking.
For ideas are not our children. We can let some of them die, making room within us for what is more compassionate, more just, and closer to the truth.
And yet, I do not think we need to erase the past. We need a new stance toward it.
To carry our memories without carrying their burdens, to remember without returning, and to grieve without becoming grief.
Perhaps one day we will discover that the most important thing we needed to change in our lives was not the world around us, but the way we saw it.
Bahraini writer
