Casinos are not good for the mind

A Casino is not the mind’s best friend

I am in Bossier City, LA, on a gambling trip for my companions. I personally do not care for it because of several reasons: noise, lights, cigarette smoke, and too many people in too small a place.

So I am in my room while the other three are at the casino. I hear a vacuum cleaner somewhere nearby out in the hallway. I imagine a woman pushing it along picking up the droppings left by other people as they go about their busy way. I wonder what she is feeling or thinking. Is it just a job to her that she must get done on her eight hour shift so she can collect her 8 hours pay and then go home and finally at that time begin her life for this day? Or maybe she is an enlightened being who enjoys each moment regardless of what activity she might be engaged in. Maybe she relishes the whine the vacuum cleaner makes as she lets it gently glide back and forth across the beautiful design of the carpeting. Perhaps she sees the pile of the carpet renewed when relieved of its burden of dust and debris. I imagine she smells the renewed freshness and compares it to the newness of her day. Perhaps she feels the shift in her body weight with the repetitious movement of the vacuum cleaner and she feels she is in the middle of a cosmic dance moving in alignment with all that is. Maybe the vacuum cleaner is seen as her “friend” who keeps her in the present. Whenever her mind wanders to a place where she is not, its whirring sound serves to bring her back into the moment, bringing her mind back into her body and her body back into life now, where she is, who she is, a life form living now.

And so I imagine my friend, who uses the vacuum cleaner that I hear, to be a very fortunate woman for she is aware of her being alive while pushing the machine. And now I hear her close by and for a brief moment in time our lives touch. However, her only awareness of me is because of a sign I have hung on the outside of my doorknob which reads “privacy please”. Her dance into my room will have to wait until “checkout” time. And so I miss an opportunity to be one with another human in the present moment.

But now the sound of the vacuum cleaner has receded and a once in a lifetime moment has passed and now I find myself alone in my “privacy please.” How often do I miss an opportunity to join in a cosmic dance with another person because I choose to put my wall up and I choose to be alone with myself? I’ll never know for now the sound of the vacuum cleaner is only a memory, unreal, a memory of missed opportunity, and unrealized possibility.

But I made the choice to be alone and so now I am happy to be aware of a conscious being though unmet and in my fantasy only. I was aware. I was alive.

Or was my fantasy a form of entertainment for a bored mind occupying a room alone? Maybe the woman with the cleaning machine saw me thusly as she danced past my room, shaking her head at the “privacy please” sign and thinking to herself “the poor unenlightened woman in there so alone and so bored she fantasizes rather than come out of her room and live”.

But she could have knocked and disturbed my privacy and she chose not to. But then she, like I, would be living in a world of imagination, a world of thought and fancy.