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.

A new me, or something like that

When I had to give up on living in London having spent two months and all of my money there I considered my coming back to my home town to be a pretty big step in the wrong direction. I went to London for a job I didn’t want and which didn’t pay enough because, having graduated and enjoyed a great summer, all I could think to do with myself was to escape this town and just to be  in a big, new, exciting place.

The reality of returning home hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as I expected and in fact I think coming back is exactly what I needed. Going to London was great fun and a lot happened within the short space of time I spent there, but I barely had a moment to myself and career-wise I was going nowhere. I worked as a fundraiser and didn’t like, nor was particularly good at my job. Also, I couldn’t find the jobs I really wanted, and I didn’t have the relevant experience behind me that would make an application to those jobs successful even if I did find them. On top of that, my living conditions were far from ideal and at times I felt unimaginably lonely in a city of so many millions of anonymous faces. I was stuck, but found it difficult even to try to remove myself from my situation for a number of reasons including not wanting to prove everybody back home right in betting that I wouldn’t make it in London and would be home by Christmas. (As it turned out, I was back over a month before Christmas came around, well in time to spend yet another birthday back at Mum’s house.)

Since I’ve been back I’ve got a full-time job as a copywriter, I’ve moved into my own flat, and most importantly I’ve been given the time, the security, and the structure to allow me to really consider what I’m doing. I’ve got a real routine for the first time since I was at school, and as much as working nine ’til five insatiably devours the minutes, hours, and days of my life, it has given me the ability to plan like I never have before. I write all day five days a week, and in the time since I began my new job I’ve written half a novel’s worth of words on subjects I had little to absolutely no understanding of prior to writing about them. For one thing, this has shown me that perhaps writing is a serious possibility for me. I’ve always wanted to write for my living, but until now I doubted it was possible for me. Now I have ideas that are not just flitting back and forth around my head, but which seem somehow possible to harness and to translate into real pieces of work.

What I really mean to say is that I feel in control. I am ‘in a good place’, an American might say. Looking after myself all by myself, I am eating healthily without having to deal with the temptations of Mum’s (very tempting – almost irresistible) baking, and I’m working out harder than I ever have before, and with a proper weight lifting schedule to follow too. I’m also expressing myself creatively, making things with my hands, sketching, writing, and painting. It’s like I’m a real, rounded person all of a sudden.

I have a series of good intentions for the next year, or however long I end up staying here. Getting really properly physically fit is one of them and I am working on that already. Another is creative expression and I’m dealing with that too. A couple of other things I want to achieve, but haven’t yet stated on the Internet: giving up alcohol altogether, and writing for a magazine. I want to achieve both of these things this year and now I’ve said it here it’s going to be hard not to try my very hardest. Now I’ve made a promise not only to myself but to you too. I will be letting down both myself and anyone reading this if I fail.Oh, and my best friend and I are starting yoga next week. New us or something like that. Really I would just like to be able to sit in the seated angle pose without worrying that my legs are about to snap.

I sat down tonight not knowing what I wanted to say. I haven’t posted anything here for over a month, and this feels good.

The End.

P.S. I’ve developed a habit in perhaps the last nine months or so of distractedly playing with my nipples in public. Make of that what you will.

An alternative thread: On being alive

First of all, I want to point out that a week has passed since the equal marriage debate. It seems so obscure, that passage of time. So long ago, yet equally pressed right up against my back as if it just happened.

Secondly, this post was going to be about something completely different until I wrote those few short sentences. It was going to be about something I wasn’t sure I should be writing about publicly just yet. So thank you, Mind, for suggesting to me this new thread of thought. It’ll give me time to think about that other thing for a while.

I remember when my life really did seem to stretch out in front of me like those great long motorways across America which I have only ever seen on a screen, which disappear into the hazy heat waves on the horizon, and I had forever ahead of me. But now it doesn’t do that at all. People sometimes talk to me as if I still see things that way, but I don’t. I’m spoken to at times as if I haven’t got a clue, and eternity is mine. Truly, I know that I haven’t got a clue. I’m perfectly willing to admit that. My mind has changed so much in just the last few years that I can’t possibly deny that I won’t think very differently in five years’ time from how I think now. But about my perspective on life – the actual experience of being alive -, nobody seems to get it right. I don’t think in terms of A leading to B, leading to C, leading to D, and so on, with each letter stacking up neatly just behind me like freshly written books on a shelf, lessons learnt to carry on with me to the next stage. I don’t see myself as different. I’m not pretending to think differently for sake of appearing alternative. I believe we all think as I do, only I let my thoughts play on my mind a little more than some others tend to.

I see life as this, now. There is nothing ahead of me. Anything I get after tonight, after typing the next letter is a bonus as far as I am concerned at this exact moment in time, and when I get to ‘the future’, like tomorrow afternoon, I’ll feel the same way. That will be now and nothing will exist apart from that. All that the future is is our ideas of what we would like for ourselves, or what we expect for ourselves, projected out into the darkness that truly exists. The projection fools us into believing we’re walking a clear path when really we’re walking absurdly confidently into the pitch black. Thankfully, we do walk. Otherwise we’d never do anything for fear of the darkness. When I imagine myself at eighty years old (this is me narrating my projections), I expect I’ll experience life just as I am experiencing it now. The future will be just as black, and the past will not exist anywhere except inside my head, as a patchwork of memories, and the now will be all there is. What’s frightening is the idea that even then, as I come to the end of my imaginable lifespan, I’ll still feel like I do now. I’ll want to grab on to something real, to hold me back and let me stay a while longer, but there is nothing to hold on to. I’m not ready for this to be over now, and I really cannot imagine that I will be ready then. Can you imagine not being alive? It’s completely absurd. This is everything we know. How can it just not be? This is the reason I  disagree with the death sentence. Some people may say that people who do bad things will live on eternally to pay for their sins, or reap the rewards of their goodness, but I’m not religious and I don’t believe there is anything to follow the exhaustion of our fragile bodies. Therefore, nobody in my opinion has the right to take from anybody else the experience of being alive, because it is the only experience. There is nothing else, so how can anybody justifiably make nothing of the delicate something we have? It’s terrifying, and utterly barbaric.

Of course I experience my mind through projections just like anybody else, but always at the back of my mind is the little voice saying this is it, and I know it’s right. 

The past is only what we’ve been told went before us, and what our unreliable memories make up from what we have experienced, or even not experienced and fabricated completely in our own imaginative heads. Looking back on good memories, we don’t experience them as they were. We will never feel that exact feeling ever again, and our memories are not perfect, so we can’t really rely on them to recreate those feeling authentically. All that truly matter is this right now. It comes across as completely clichéd, but I really mean it; I really believe it. Of course, social structures dictate that in order to experience life as we would like to experience it, we must do work to earn money to pay for what we want, and so most of us never achieve the feelings we project into our own individual darknesses. I can honestly, openly say that if I could be feeling anything else right now, as I am alive, I would not be feeling what I am feeling now. I’m not feeling anything dreadful, but I want to feel something better. It seems like such a waste to spend these valuable minutes experiencing the intangible thing that is being alive in any state other than that which we call happiness. There will come a point when you are not.

Look back at certain points in your life, and they seem so close, so defined, even if the image is blurred. The future seems so far away, so unreal, because it is. But when we get to a point we imagine now is far away, it will feel just like being here in this second feels. Progression is an illusion. The future doesn’t exist, and it exists no less than the past.

There is nothing more than this biological existence. Can you see your eyelids blinking across your eyes? That is it. We have no choice but to keep on walking, taking whatever chance happens to cause us to exist with from one moment to the next, be it pleasure or pain, sadness or happiness. But please let it be happiness. If nothing else, let the end come whilst I am happy.