“The things you think about determine the things you think about”

“The things you think about determine the things you think about” is a compact statement about attention becoming self-reinforcing. Windy offers it as a way to understand how focus shapes what the mind returns to; Helen applies it to a choice between fixating on feeling overlooked and noticing the wilderness she is coming to inhabit.

Meaning and Context

Helen has realized that everyone in the group has a nickname except her. She is called Helen—or sometimes “Ellen,” a misrendering of her actual name. To her, a nickname signals that others know and recognize a person; lacking one feels like the opposite of having an identity. The thought angers her, and she imagines that even a dramatic misfortune might go unnoticed.

The expression comes into play because the slight is easy to keep turning over. After Helen notices the nickname situation, the group spends three uneventful days hiking. She recognizes that she could have stewed over the issue through every step of the route, but remembers Windy’s observation: sustained attention can make the mind more likely to attend to the same thing again.

Helen’s Choice

Rather than continue feeding her resentment, Helen decides not to focus on the nickname and instead tries to appreciate what the wilderness offers. Her decision is active, not a claim that the hurt has vanished: she redirects her attention toward particulars that are available to her on the trail.

Those particulars make the shift concrete. Helen notices a hidden waterfall, elk scat near a stream, a salmon leaping from a creek and disappearing back into the water, and a sunset whose eight colors the group counts. She also registers that her face has become so dirty that it no longer feels dirty. The expression thus links a general observation about thought to a practice of noticing, with sensory details replacing the grievance as the material of her attention.

Recurrence and Significance

The shift does not make Helen’s time in the wilderness perfect or uncomplicated. She says she is beginning to feel at home there in her own uneven way, while also managing to pretend Jake is not present. The juxtaposition keeps the limits of her choice visible: redirecting attention can alter what occupies her mind without resolving every discomfort or relationship.

As Helen’s own formulation of Windy’s advice, the expression becomes a small turning point in how she experiences the hike. It gives her a means to interrupt rumination and attend to the landscape, helping her feel more at home without suggesting that the original hurt was imaginary or instantly overcome.