Building a Mind

Today I am suffering day number two of a god-awful hangover, and in between sips of orange juice and slices of pizza I have wondered what happened to the pledge I made to myself two blog posts ago to seriously cut down my alcohol intake. I don’t drink often, but as is typical of the British I have a tendency to drink to excess whenever I do do it. Not experiencing this dryness of the mouth and aching of the head is the reason I wanted to stop drinking in the first place, but it’s all gone a bit wrong. This has gone a bit wrong too, I think. My writing on this blog. What it is is that I feel as though I’ve begun to preach. I didn’t start posting these thoughts with the intention of shoving my views down people’s throats, but I believe I have started to do just that. I feel anger and discomfort in my own writing, and I don’t like it.

My ‘views’. I don’t feel comfortable with that term in itself. ‘View’ implies ‘opinion’ and I find the concept of opinions difficult to come to terms with. What is an opinion but a learned connection between an action or a certain belief system or a piece of music and the idea that it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?  Opinions are really just associations our brains make between a thing and a feeling. As I understand it, (and please, anyone who knows better, do correct me if I’m wrong) our brains are not like pools of water within which the ability to think is fluid and capable of taking any course we feel like. An individual thought – an idea connecting two other separate ideas – takes a strict course. It is the interaction between those two separate ideas already existing in the brain via the synapses that, I believe, are created each time we think a new thought. So it isn’t random or fluid, and it’s sort of stuck. Opinions, it seems to me, once set must be added to in order to expand one’s knowledge, or understanding, or to develop one’s empathy. So is it possible to ever truly change an opinion if that original thought – the bridging of one idea to another via a physical structure in the brain – always exists at the root of the issue? It’s like building a Lego house around a broken Lego brick which won’t come unstuck from the big green base. I don’t know. I am not remotely scientific. I have never studied the brain beyond the basics of GCSE biology.  All I can say is that I am interested in people’s opinions because they can be so solid, yet somebody else’s opinion on the same subject can be completely opposite to it. This suggests to me there is little fluidity in the creation of opinions. We set ideas in minds like we show people where to drive their cars by laying roads. Point A leads to Point B, from which the road leads directly to Point C. What a child learns, therefore, will be the basis for whatever information it collects from then on.

I have mentioned before my young siblings’ strong opinions on certain issues of particular interest to me, and how they worry me. Recently I have been worrying less about the fact that they have them, and more about the fact that they have been put there by somebody, or something. Something has taken a young head and structured it in such a way as dictates that its owner is made to believe that X is bad and Y is good, and without fluidity of thought there is no way of getting rid of that association. The car must follow the road. I can try to build upon this broken brick in such a way as reduces the influence of that small initial thought by drowning it out with ideas which contradict it, but it will always be there. It is a seed planted deep in the soil of the most fertile mind.

Each of us is a product of our influences, be they natural or nurtured, and it terrifies me that we have this capability to influence. We are all of us – no matter how much we try to fight it and to think for ourselves – we are all given a road to travel by those we are made to or choose to spend time with, or by what we read, or are made to read, or see, or are made to see. None of us is free. We are all wired like robots to behave in certain ways, filled with combinations of ones and zeros and corresponding actions and beliefs. So, I have been wondering, why do we not feel a greater duty of care over young minds? I am not a parent, although one day I hope to be, so perhaps I am completely unqualified to comment. Perhaps it is just too hard to manipulate a child’s mind in only the best ways possible. But is there no way of setting the best foundations for the construction of a mind? Surely that is our greatest responsibility in the advancement of the human race. But who am I to decide what the best way is? By my own admission I cannot think any more fluidly than the rest of humanity, so how can I ever be sure that the ideas I intend to plant in my children’s minds are not the poisonous foundations of hatred, apathy, and selfishness?

What I can do is to focus on the building blocks I choose to add to the structure that is my own mind. What foundations are laid will be in my head for the rest of my life, until perhaps my mind begins to dismantle itself, and even now I will continue to be laid roads for by outside influences which I do not choose, but cannot help, to acknowledge. I have been steadily teaching myself mostly over the last three or four years simply to question. If there is anything which can help us build positively it is questioning. Once the idea of questioning everything is established – once that seed is sown –  the ability to reassess and to stop and wonder becomes not only an ability but a compulsion. Since making the conscious effort a few years ago not to take things at face value, and to properly determine the worth, the validity, and the goodness of things on their own merits, I have enjoyed riding with the changes I can feel in my own head. There is nothing more satisfying, and nothing more important for us as human beings than influencing a mind, even if to begin with that mind is only your own.

Body versus Mind

We are all essentially physical beings. We’re clusters of cells and one day our bodies – the things that we are – will give up the fight against whatever happens to attack us, be it cancer, or heart disease, or a speeding car, and I believe that will be the end of us.

It is possible to prolong, even if only slightly, the time for which we experience being simply by taking care of ourselves. I was nearing legal adulthood by the time I began caring at all how well my body worked. I spent my childhood and teenage years wrapped pretty cosily inside my head and the thought of taking care of myself – my skin, bone, and muscle – laid dormant somewhere in the back of my mind behind the straightened hair and eye shadow that represented my yearning for physical wellness. Hair products and make up were more familiar to me then than dumbbells and running shoes, and so I took care of myself as best I knew how to in front of a mirror. At the same time I read books, falling into a bit of a love affair with Jane Austen at sixteen and seventeen, both because I enjoyed it and saw it as mentally enriching. I wanted to take care of myself physically as well as mentally even though I didn’t know how to do both.

I underwent something of a revolution between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, when I slowly developed the courage to venture into a gym – I had never been, and still am not a fan of sport – to begin figuring out how to look after myself. I began by assimilating in the only way I knew how, by sticking strictly to the treadmills where the women tended to congregate. The grunts and groans of the weights section were as frightening as the centre of the rugby pitch had been during P.E. lessons and I nervously crept around its edges for a few months before bravely venturing to try out the weight machines, which I had noticed some of the women using to hone their abs.

Since then I’ve become pretty competent at working out and eating pretty well, and I enjoy feeling healthy and fit and – something it took a while to realise I even wanted to feel – masculine. I’d always tutted at the notion of ‘masculinity’ and the image of the hefty, heaving Neanderthal I associated with it, and lifting weights perfectly complimented that image. I considered myself to be an academic and, like so many people still do, I believed that people are destined to exist as either academics or a body-obsessed ignoramuses, and that never the interests of the twain should meet. It was books or sport; essays or reps; fine wine or protein shakes. But why? Since I’ve begun taking care of myself I have faced criticism from various people – all invariably the type to consign themselves strictly to the academic division of humanity – who for one reason or another see something demeaning in my strive for physical fitness. ‘Oh, why’ – they ask, exasperatedly – ‘are you doing that?’ Well, why not? Does it say something about me that I don’t want said? Does it say ‘this person does not think’? If so, so be it. The attitudes of academics to physical exercise that I have encountered are attitudes based in ignorance. I’m inclined to believe that envy plays a part in the criticism I have received. To exercise requires determination and strong will. Just as writing an essay takes the discipline of sitting and focussing on any topic for extended periods of time, lifting dumbbells takes the discipline of ignoring the urge to relent – to do what is easier and go home to an early dinner – in order to achieve a goal.

However, even I am guilty of viewing physical gains as a result of gym workouts as something to be ashamed of for some reason. Whilst writing this, I took a break, and during this break I received a compliment on the evident progress I’ve made with my body in recent months. Even though I am proud of what I’m achieving, and intend to continue to achieve indefinitely, I couldn’t take the compliment standing tall. I shrunk away and mumbled an ‘oh, yeah, thanks’ half to myself. I’m pretty certain I blushed. I could feel the judging eyes of my academic peers burning into me as I sat there like a limp leaf, shy and not sure how to react.

Still, I am proud. I’ve come across examples in the past of intelligent people writing about the satisfaction they feel in not bowing to the pressure of the media to be slim, toned, bronze, and rippling with muscle. That’s fine. I really, truthfully, do not care what anybody else does with their body. But I consider not exercising the body in cases where it is possible to do so as equal to not exercising the mind when it is possible to do so. I could sit at home and wrap myself up in the goings on of the lives of celebrities whose every move is documented by countless identical magazines. I would learn nothing and probably not develop in any meaningful or beneficial way. What I choose to do is to read novels, informative articles, and opinions which I think will somehow enrich my mind and life in general. Similarly, I could sit at home not exercising, eating whatever I liked whilst finding out when Kim Kardashian had her last colonic. Instead, I organise myself so that I know when and for how long I will exercise and what I want to achieve with each visit to the gym. I work hard, resist temptation, and see the results. And it makes me happy.

I like to read and I like to write, and I like to run and I like to lift weights. I’m pretty content, and I’m making my choices for me. Whether or not I am influenced by the media I couldn’t say for sure. Besides, is someone who lives differently from the way I do any less influenced by what they see and are made to see? Live and let live, unless it’s life or death. I think that’s a pretty good attitude.