On Caring for the Mind

Make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.

Custom statue of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands (1990) from the Tim Burton movie. Edward, a synthetic man with scissor hands, is taken in by Peg, a kindly Avon lady, after the passing of his inventor. At first he’s loved by the townspeople. And though kind and well-meaning, things take a turn for the worse when he’s blamed for a crime he didn’t commit.

“You have been formed of three parts—body, breath, and mind. Of these, the first two are yours insofar as they are only in your care. The third alone is truly yours.” - Marcus Aurelius

The consultant eventually spoke after pretending not to see me. And where exactly were you this morning? he asked. A tamponade of tension made the theatre go quiet- the scrub nurse pretended to count swabs, the resident was suddenly fascinated by the monitor. I had told him. I had told the anesthetist, the nurse, even texted him on WhatsApp; I had gone to watch the ex-laparotomy because he himself, last week, had said go and see things. None of that mattered now. Worse, he didn’t believe me. My voice cracked and became faint mid-sentence as I tried to defend myself. And underneath that my fury grew, dawning on me that whatever respect I had for this man was gathering its coat and leaving the room.

Incidences like these can be disheartening- especially from someone whose work you admire. So how do you survive- or even thrive through it all?

There is, it turns out, one possession the world cannot tax, the weather cannot ruin, and fortune cannot repossess- and yet most people leave unattended. Your mind. The one instrument through which every sunset, every first kiss, every funeral and Friday night is filtered. A lot of pain and misery come from its neglect. Milton saw this clearly, as he talks about in Paradise Lost- the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.

So how do you tend the thing? You begin by deciding what gets in your scope of attention. You become ruthless about your company, about the content you consume, about food, about the small sips of conversation you take throughout the day- because the mind absorbs its surroundings the way a sponge takes on the color of whatever water it sits in. Marcus said the soul becomes dyed the color of your thoughts. Open the social app first thing in the morning, and you’ve already poisoned your mind with the tawdry opinions of strangers. Fill the day instead with a good book on the nightstand, a friend who wants to connect with you, good vibes, a walk without earphones, and something remarkable happens- you begin to move through your days with a tranquility other people can’t imagine. Epictetus called this prosoche- attention, vigilance, the unbroken practice of watching what enters your mind and what takes root. He was a slave when he learned it. You, presumably, have fewer excuses.

You tend it, too, by refusing to sell yourself cheaply. You stop rewriting the message three times because you’re afraid of how it’ll sound. You stop checking, for the nth time, who viewed your story. You stop bartering small pieces of your peace and integrity for the brittle thrill of being thought well of by people whose taste you wouldn’t trust on a restaurant recommendation. You let others have their flimsy opinions, and you keep your composure. Marcus Aurelius- emperor of Rome, master of the known world, a man who could have retreated to any villa on the Mediterranean- wrote that the truest retreat is the one you take into yourself. The work, then, is to make yourself somewhere worth retreating to. To put a cool art of thoughts on your mental.

“Men seek retreats for themselves - in the country, by the sea, in the hills - and you yourself are particularly prone to this yearning. But all this is quite unphilosophic, when it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself. No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease: and by ease I simply mean a well-ordered life. So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself. The doctrines you will visit there should be few and fundamental, sufficient at one meeting to wash away all your pain and send you back free of resentment at what you must rejoin.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

You direct your attention toward what’s yours to do, towards what’s possible- the email you’ve been avoiding, the call to your mother, the work you keep promising yourself you’ll start on Monday. You exercise, because a sluggish body drags the mind down like a stone in a sock. You sleep, because no philosophy survives sleep deprivation, and Seneca was right that the worst diseases are the ones we inflict on ourselves through our habits. You read. You write. You meditate. You sit in silence long enough to generate a genuine thought- which, in a century engineered to prevent it, is closer to revolutionary than anyone admits.

There’s a discipline here that sounds strict but is actually the most generous gift you can give yourself. You stop reacting to every provocative thing said in your direction. You stop trying to control what was never yours to control. You learn that everything outside you is in constant flux, subject to fortune, but how you see, how you interpret, how you act- that’s yours. Always yours. The whole of Stoicism, in a way, is a long meditation on that single sentence.

The beautiful thing is that the mind you’ve been tending to begins, after a while, to take good care of you. It steers you through fear before the difficult conversation. It earns your living. It sees through the manipulation you would have once walked straight into. It finds you the right sentence, the resilience in the bleakest of midwinters, the right next step. You start to feel lively in a way you had nearly forgotten was possible- the way you felt as a child on the last day of school.

So care for your mind. Value it above nearly everything. Treat it as the rare and irreplaceable instrument it is- because it’s the only one standing between you and the monsters of the world. Between you and happiness.

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