No B.S Friday: The news is giving me stomach cramps!
I don’t know if it’s just me, but some days I’m just begging for a mental enema.
There’s just so much going on in my head. Thoughts weigh nothing but carrying them all around makes physically exhausted.
I’m crunching the numbers on this or that deal, I’m running a business, I’m staying on top of current affairs, I’m preparing blogs, I’m managing complex social relationships (No, that dress is very slimming), I’m preparing witty put-downs for my friend who goes for Collingwood.
*Flush.
I wish. Modern life is hard like that. Our brains were never meant to carry and process so much information. The human species is in desperate need of a hardware upgrade.
But then we go out and we stuff ourselves til we’re sick in the head with information.
Social media, for example, is an all-you-can-eat sushi-train of mental baggage – the information just keeps coming at you. You don’t have to do a thing…
Nom nom nom.
After a while, it all becomes a burden. It gets heavy. I don’t want to carry it around. I don’t want new information. I don’t want new stimulus. I want to close down, shut off, curl up on a couch somewhere and eat cookies.
(Is that what the illuminati really wants?)
But this is what it feels like to me. The brain is another digestive organ. Whatever you feed your brain it needs to digest – it needs to process it and work it out.
And when it comes to the brain, just like the stomach, you need to watch what you eat.
Now some people might say, ‘Not me Jon. I can watch 5 episodes of My Kitchen Rules a night and it doesn’t affect me.’
And that might be true. It might be the case for some people that their brains have given up trying to process the information they’re given. They just let everything go through to the keeper / colon.
It’s not digesting so it never feels full.
But a brain that isn’t digesting is a brain that is not drawing any nourishment. It’s not learning, growing, becoming wiser or, in my case, more cunning.
Do you really want that?
But the price of having a curious mind seems to be that we can often end up stuffed. We become bloated, slow and dull if we’re not careful.
So it seems the there are two disciplines we need to develop if we’re going to walk lightly in a world of dense information streams.
The first is obviously getting disciplined with what we consume – in exactly the same way that any weight-loss strategy involves getting disciplined not just with the quality but also the quantity of food we eat.
And that means it’s not enough to say that I only get my news from quality publications like Buzzfeed, if you’re binging out on them every night.
The second discipline is finding ways to regularly flush the mind. It could be chewing the fat with a friend, or even some private journal practice.
It could be just going for a walk and day-dreaming.
You’ve just got to keep the stimulation moving. You can’t just eat the news of some fresh horror in the middle east and not let it move through you in some way. Even if that’s just to comment. “OMG. How horrible.”
Don’t let yourself get blocked up.
(There’s probably some role for meditation here too but that’s not my bag, so if someone’s got insight into that I’d be happy to hear it.)
But the goal here is to move lightly in the world, and to keep our minds fresh, nimble and curious.
Unfortunately, it won’t happen on its own.
JG.