Every now and then, when I sit down to write an article—long or short—the subject I choose feels a little odd, even bizarre. Sometimes the thoughts appear so unnatural that I begin to worry: will readers dismiss them as sheer nonsense?
Take, for example, a recent piece I titled “DON’T JOIN THE ARMED FORCES…” I thought it would ignite fresh reflections, or at least provoke debate. Instead, the silence was deafening. For hours, no response came. I began to suspect my idea was not only weird but absurd enough to deserve deletion.
But just as I hovered near the “delete” button, a longtime friend and fellow journalist stepped in. He not only liked the piece but shared it across two of his sites. Soon after, another friend—a scholar with a keen pen and a thoughtful mind—offered a supportive comment. Their responses rescued my article from the trash bin and, more importantly, reassured me of something vital: even weird thoughts have meaning.
In fact, much of human progress has emerged from ideas once dismissed as eccentric. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously noted, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
Strange thoughts stretch the boundaries of our usual thinking. They challenge the comfortable patterns of conformity.
So, if a thought seems weird, odd, or premature, it may simply be the mind knocking on new doors. Sometimes those doors open into surprising rooms of wisdom.
Weird thoughts, after all, make sense too.
—Promod Puri
Promod Puri.com 