The importance of having a life of the mind.
Your screen will not always be with you.
Maybe it’ll be an EMP.
Or illness in a hospital bed with beeps and a broken TV.
An apocalypse in which people fight for a single printed page.
Maybe it’ll just be today.
I worry about people who will arrive at some metaphorical waiting room in life, at a period of aloneness of starting over, or at the end of their life, without someone around to entertain them.
Unless, of course, they’ve cultivated a life of the mind all along.
Oh, how we love to focus on the physical body.
Our feeds are filled with posts and ads promoting physical wellness, fitness, and optimal health. Our bodies are tangible, and the things we do to change them are something we can measure. We can take a photo. We can log it on an app. We can prove to ourselves and others that we did something.
Big muscles, flat stomachs, regular bowel movements—the list is long when it comes to the markers for wellness, almost as long as the ways we justify our actions to get it. Parents legitimize school, church, and family absences because sports are good, are healthy, and help promote life skills like teamwork and being coachable.1 We created a self-care movement that leans more selfish and product or service-based than actual human thriving.
Then there’s the life of the mind.
This is not tangible. It’s hard to sell products for a life of the mind other than supplements that help the physical brain, online classes, or coaching with someone making dubious claims and even more dubious credentials.
“Are you motivated by results!” the ad tells us, and then finds a way to cram all things into tangible meaning.
But the life of the mind is more resistant to measurables. Sometimes its payout is decades down the road, the results less obvious until suddenly they are.
The life of the mind is when we purposefully build our minds as much as we would our bodies. It’s being intentional about what we read, learn, and think instead of haphazardly tossing information in as it floats by. It’s doing the work to avoid zoning out in front of screens or letting your mind wander. Mental atrophy is very easy to do and very hard to spot.
We’ll lift the weights, but we won’t lift our thoughts.
Without a life of the mind, we haven’t created the fallback thought patterns gathered the information so that, when the crucial moment comes, we can’t make decisions.
We don’t know how to recognize what is theoretical, what is practical, and how they are connected. We can’t spot patterns of behavior or warning because we don’t know enough to fill in the gaps to flesh that pattern out. We allow emotions and reaction tied to thought movements to let us determine what we think about conspiratorial theories. We don’t realize it’s not just enough to think, but to know how to think.
This is a lifetime pursuit, this life of the mind.
It is not achieved—and the habits are not formed—by fixation on sports, test results, and median standards. It is not achieved in front of an audience. It is not achieved with accolades. It is not achieved by sweating the small stuff. It absolutely will never develop in social media apps or doom scrolling on gorilla glass.
It thrives in curiosity, one that truly values the pursuit of knowledge beyond what is necessary for practical, daily life.
It understands that what seems unnecessary will be integrated into the mind in a way that, someday, will find a use by connecting the dots in a crucial moment. Perhaps in a conversation, perhaps in a trivia game, perhaps in a moment when you have a problem and realize you also have an unbelievable solution, or perhaps when someday you are not physically able to move about as much, and you find enjoyment in reliving the things you learned in books, conversations, and travels.
A life of the mind is a destination.
You can go there when you’re trapped, alone, waiting, or physically reduced. You are not at the mercy of content providers. You are not at the mercy of who might entertain you. You are not at the mercy of a full battery. You are not at the mercy of your feelings. You are not at the mercy of your situation. You are not at the mercy of your physical fitness.
Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee. (Psalm 119:11)
For Christians, it means accepting the gift and the weight of having the cognitive ability to comprehend the things God has placed for us to consider.
Though the life of the mind is sometimes twisted today,2 believers have a bigger burden to pursue it than anyone else. God has instructed us to do so. When we seek him, we seek the Creator of everything who knows all things.
Find a balance between a healthy physical body and, equally, your mind.
Maybe. I think we could debate the value of high school sports as we do them today, including the god-like status it has taken and how sporting events no longer respect family budgets, church nights, or even education. But this post is about something else.
It bothers me to discover, in my online research, that in some cases, looking for “bible verses on the mind” brings up Kenneth Copeland Ministries. Any Bible verse can be taken out of context by anyone; the fact that someone uses a Bible verse doesn’t legitimize their claim. You are responsible to read the surrounding verses in context in the Bible. Whether New Age gurus or preachers or teachers out at the fringes, you will find that the life of the mind is a principle that takes on something very different from what I’m talking about here. Your mind was created by God, it is a treasure, but it won’t make you God. It can be a tool because it is a gift from God, but it can also become a weapon of self-destruction because the enemy would like you to fill it and use it in horrible ways.
We live in an age where the body is often outliving the mind. Aging is cruel in what it erases, and my wife and I have seen dementia strike people we know in their late 50s.
Some may quibble about the mind's connection to the soul, but perhaps better than cultivating a deep thought life is to deepen the soul. Perhaps that's all we have available in the end. We seem to have enough masters of the mind but a profound dearth of masters of the soul. They were likely never abundant, but God knows I meet fewer and fewer such people.