The Pink Elephant

I once heard a weird saying about pink elephants. Something like if you are told not to think about a pink elephant, the first thing you think about is a pink elephant. So, with everything going on lately, I think I have been thinking a lot about pink elephants. And wondering if I haven't been creating my own chaos.

(I don't have any elephants, so Ill share my two other favorite stuffed animals instead).


There have been lot of different religions, self help books, and motivational speakers that have talked about the power of the spoken word and the power of our own thoughts. I'm not really sure that I have ever bought into that very much, because I've always been of the opinion that what is going to happen will happen regardless of what I think or say. But what if that isn't true? What if thinking about the pink elephant really makes the pink elephant appear?

It seems that when something bad happens, we start to doubt everything in our a life. A fight with your parents leads to doubts about what you are worth, which leads to doubting your significant other, which leads to a messy break up, which leads to thinking that nothing works out like you want it to, which leads to having to fire your daycare, which leads to you thinking that your never gonna make it anywhere or as anything, which leads to your computer breaking, which happens to be your lifeline to school, thus causing you to think about failing...and so on and so on. That is a truly hypothetical example...of course.


Maybe the thoughts that you think lead you to act in a way you wouldn't normally. You transform who you are not because of the situation your in, but because of the way you view it. You create your own pink elephant. Maybe, just maybe, we control more than we think. And our thoughts are simply self fulling prophesies.

There are a lot of sayings that include elephants - do you know any other cool elephant sayings?

Here are a couple:

Let a person walk alone with few wishes, committing no wrong, like an elephant in the forest.

It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us, we can dodge an elephant, but we can't fly.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephants faithful 100%. (You know I had to include this one)

Keep five yards from a carriage, ten yards from a horse, and a hundred yards from an elephant; but the distance one should keep from a wicked man cannot be measured.