Is your car due for a WOF?

Over lunch a friend casually remarked, “By the way, I couldn’t help noticing that the warrant on your car runs out next week”. It was my son’s car and he hadn’t noticed. Typical. Now he’d have to get round to fixing the headlight and the radiator leak and book it in for a test in the little time available while we were in Christchurch.

A couple of days later in Christchurch, Luca called me to say, “The WOF doesn’t actually run out till June. It’s fine.”

Now here’s what is interesting about the story: Not one of us thought to check the situation for ourselves. It was plausible, even probable to our minds and so we accepted it as Truth.

It is so easy to get an idea into our heads. And an idea can become deeply embedded in our body-mind. Perhaps some figure you admire or respect once said something to you and without knowing it, you carry an idea in your body-mind for years. For example, did anyone ever tell you to ‘pull your shoulders back’, or ‘ tuck your tail under’, or ‘keep your knees together’?

Sometimes it is bizarre what we take on. As a young actor, F.M. Alexander was once told to ‘take hold of the floor with your feet’. Much later he discovered that this one piece of well-meaning advice had led him to develop an unconscious pattern of muscular tension, pulling his toes in, that was affecting his whole psycho-physical co-ordination.

And sometime we have no idea just which words our subconscious decides to take on board. I once set my computer password to ‘forget it’. And promptly did so. In the end I had to get a tech friend to reset the whole system.