The Fixer
Several years ago, while working with the Kay Yow Cancer Fund, we struck up a deal with Cintas, the professional uniform company that outfits everyone from chefs to fireman to surgeons, and all those in between. I had never heard of Cintas at the time. I’d never worn a uniform of any kind (unless athletic jerseys count), nor had anyone in my family, so it never occurred to me that supplying them might be big business. After a presentation about who Cintas was as a company and how they functioned as a community with broader goals for all their people, I became a big fan. When they agreed to a partnership with the Kay Yow Cancer Fund to sponsor our efforts in the fight against all women’s cancers, I became an even bigger fan. And then something funny happened.
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I flew back to Oklahoma from North Carolina and on my drive home from the airport, I saw a Cintas truck. I can’t recall ever seeing one before in my life. A couple of days later while at a stoplight, I saw a Cintas van in the parking lot adjacent to the highway. The following week when pulling in to park for a friend’s wedding, I noticed a Cintas vehicle turning around in the lot across the way. Then, while waiting for seating at a restaurant, I saw a hostess carrying a sack full of uniforms to the back. You guessed it, the sack said “Cintas” on the sides. Suddenly they were chasing me. The uniform company I had never heard of was everywhere I looked.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t slip a tracker in my shoe at the Kay Yow meeting, but I began to see Cintas at every turn. Because I was unfamiliar before then, the workday supplier had never registered in my sight. Once the brand became a friendly to my brain, all at once they were in plain view.
No wonder our parents always told us to be careful what we listened to and aware of what we watched. Our brains stick to suggestions like a bird dog sticks to scents.
The human brain is a magnificent machine that controls every single bodily function—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. And it handles them simultaneously, like a masterful juggler that walks and talks while keeping forty-two balls moving through the air. As if that were not enough, it is also the great interpreter of information from the outside world, as well as the housing complex for the essence of the mind and soul. The brain is a marvelous hub of understanding that can do pretty much everything under the sun, except help us understand how it does the things it does.
And while its incomprehensible capabilities wow us at every turn, vigilance is its ace.
We rarely pause to consider it, but we carry around a three-pound fixer in our heads. In between governing our walking and talking and breathing, our brains are adept at sprinting ahead of us to clear the disarray. It’s an uncanny ability that I am in awe of and appreciate greatly. Until it gets in the way. For example, when I’m polishing up a piece of writing-- doing final editing, not the kind where you’re trying to clarify thoughts or clean out unnecessary adjectives, but the kind where you’re just trying to make sure you spelled names correctly or you didn’t type two articles in a row like ‘a a horse’ or ‘the the doorknob’—sometimes my brain gets ahead of itself. It gets in feisty, show-off mode and makes things right before I can even recognize that they’re wrong. It adds words for me that are not on the page, skips right over some that don’t belong, and rearranges the letters to make misspelled words seem right. Sometimes I re-read a piece fifteen times and cannot see the spills. While I appreciate the expertise of the computer in my skull, there are occasions when I’d prefer that it lay low for just a bit.
But that’s not how it’s wired. Brain cells are always working even when we don’t have them on specific assignment. And the work they do is shaped by past experiences. They go where we have trained them to go. What we’ve exposed ourselves to, what we’ve done, where we’ve been… it all congeals together creating a road map for what the brain does next. That’s why I read the words well spelled and see Cintas everywhere. The best computer that will ever exist gives me what it thinks I want.
Coaches have long told athletes to write down what they crave to do. We tell them to read the list daily, to listen to themselves say the words over and over out loud. And we reiterate that the more specifically they describe their objectives, the more likely their brains are to be able to bring them to fruition. Positive affirmations are big, big business for a reason. Repetitive thinking patterns build ruts that future thoughts fall into. Our brains are consummate pleasers. They’ll work quite hard to give us what we tell them we’d like to get.
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A while back, I was talking to a friend about this beautiful mimosa tree in my neighbor’s front yard. Mimosas have these feathery green fern-like leaves with beautiful pink plumes that smell as good as they look. Together we bemoaned how much we missed them, as they were everywhere, it seemed, in the respective small towns where we grew up. Neither of us could remember the last time we saw one in the area where we live.
The following day, on a walk, I noticed one just around the corner from my house. I couldn’t believe it had been hiding in plain sight. Then I snapped a picture of one blooming among some oaks on the next street over. By the time I’d finished my three-mile course, I’d counted 17 mimosas that I’d never even seen. They weren’t extinct in Norman, Oklahoma. They’d just gotten deeply buried under piles inside my mind.
The brain will follow the trail we leave for it whether we realize we’ve dropped breadcrumbs or not. Its modus operandi is picking up on clues. The clear, the faint, the not-even-aware-ofs—they all become marching orders for the dutiful watchman that never stops working. Even while we sleep.
P.S. This will make you feel like a genius…
“You might not realize it, but your brain is a code-cracking machine.
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S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.” (Wolchover, 2012).