Not Just From Pickles and Doughnuts

Chapter 1 excerpt from The Power of Thinking Differently by Javy W. Galindo

(Please first read Saved Through Stories: The Island of Pickles and Doughnuts)

One spring day, after the winds had died down, after cloudy night skies finally gave way to stars, when the moon was in the seventh house, and Jupiter was aligned with Mars, the most extraordinary thing occurred.

It was the one day out of every pickle year that the people of the village took time out of their pickle and doughnut lives to do something different. It was the day when the carnival came to town. But out of all the previous years, this was the first time in a long time that it arrived right after a great storm.

The carnival occurred annually, and all the villagers attended annually. It was a festival full of sideshow freaks that included a sword swallower, a bearded lady, and an extraordinarily strong man. The villagers always marveled at the site, wondering what bad batch of doughnuts the bearded lady must have eaten, what finely made ones the strong man must have eaten, and where the swordsman ever found such an astonishingly long pickle.

Yet this wasn’t all. The carnival was also well populated with various booths and stages of fast talking carnie barkers; salesmen of all sorts with their rapid speech and flashy signs who were trying to sell the latest miracle drug, potion, or device. The villagers were all very impressed by the problems these fantastic products could cure, fix, and improve. Even more than this, they were astounded by the stories the barkers told of how they came to discover and invent such amazing panaceas.

The fast moving lips and high-energy motions would also always excite the villagers, but the barkers spoke in a language that was too foreign and too quick for the villagers to truly understand what was being hocked to them. Every year a handful of villagers would become inspired enough to buy the barker’s products. But without a strong understanding of the product, the miracle panacea would eventually find its way to an obscure corner of the villager’s doughnut hut; forgotten about after only a few days.

At the end of this particular carnival day, after the sun had begun to set and the carnival tents began to fall, a small group of fanciful villagers began to unknowingly assemble by the old oak tree that stood just outside the carnival grounds. There was the village chef, the village doughnut maker, the laborer, the farmer who employed the laborer, and a religious person. They all had their heads in the clouds, their minds spinning with possibilities that were inspired by the barkers. Their thoughts so preoccupied them that not only did they not notice one another, but they did not notice the poor beggar that was unsuccessfully trying to fall asleep under the oak tree.

Their attention collapsed back into the present moment as the last of the villagers stumbled out from the carnival.

“I’ve got it!” cried the village drunk. “I’ve got it!”

“Me too!” replied the farmer, as his thoughts returned to earth.

“Me three!” replied the laborer.

The chef began to laugh. “I thought I was the only one. I thought I was the only one who made sense out of what those barkers were saying.”

“No. I was there too,” added the religious person. “I was seeing the exact same things you were. I heard of all the wonderful stories of how they came to discover their strange new medicines and devices. But I thought I was the only one who put it together; who was inspired by barker’s tales to come up with a way to generate new ideas – ones that can help us change the village.”

“No. I put it together as well!” remarked the doughnut maker. “Let’s fry up some new ideas.”

They all then began looking at each other with large grins. None of them had left with any of the barkers’ products, but from what they experienced that day, they each had a sense of what it would take to create change. After listening to the barkers tell their tales of how they invented or discovered their panaceas, the villagers each believed they had found the keys to discovering new ideas and finding new ways of living their pickle and doughnut based lives.

“Then it is agreed,” said the laborer. “In order to generate new ideas we must work hard and then hope for some lucky accident in which a new idea will fall upon our laps.”

The others stared at him with bewilderment. “What?” the chef yelled out. “You’re crazy! What we are supposed to do is immerse ourselves in an intersecting stream of ideas. Like adding ingredients to a soup, we are to gather as many different perspectives as possible, and see what new flavor arises.”

“Were you two paying attention to anything that was going on in the carnival?” asked the doughnut maker. “We are to do the opposite of what you just recommended, chef. We are to take ourselves out of our familiar ideas. In order to find something new we need to extract ourselves from our old soup of ideas, just like extracting a doughnut from old oil.”

The farmer spoke up saying, “the opposite, yes, but not of the chef. We need to do the opposite of my employee, the laborer. In order to attain new insights, we need not lift a finger. Rather, we must have patience and wait for them to arrive. Just like waiting for pickles to grow before we harvest them.”

The drunk took a sip of his flask and then lifted it up toward his companions. “It is much simpler than that my friends. This here is the magic potion –” he paused to unleash an odorous burp, “– that will help us come up with a new way of seeing things.”

The religious person took hold of the flask. “That may have its effects, my friend. But it is nothing compared to the true source of creative ideas. The spirits within this bottle are miniscule compared to the creative spirits that are available to us from the divine.”

Suddenly, the great buzz that pervaded the group of villagers at the outset of their encounter was reduced to mumbles. Their excitement plummeted to the earth, as if overwhelmed by the island’s gravity.

The beggar looked up from the ground and started giggling. Yet the villagers ignored him, too engrossed in their own puzzlements to have heard his chuckles.

“But how could this be,” the laborer said while shaking his head. “We were all together throughout the carnival…we saw the same things, we heard the same things. How could we have different perceptions of how to attain new ideas? Which one of us is right?”

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