The Old Philosopher – John M. Miller
(Lifelong Learning Hilton Head Island – Feb. 25, 2016)
The Life of the Mind
Forty years ago the United Negro College Fund featured a television commercial which included a brief statement that has become an icon of American collective memory: “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” The implied concept behind that memorable declaration is that young people need an education in order to have their minds properly nourished. The Ad Council, which sponsored the commercial, was suggesting that in order to get ahead, young black people particularly needed a college education, since a smaller percentage of them were receiving higher education than other young people.
Whoever first conceived that very sagacious turn of phrase performed a great service to the entire nation, and not just to the United Negro College Fund. Wittingly or unwittingly, millions of people have allowed those words to be imprinted on their brains: “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste.”
It is so true that it can become a truism; a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And yet all of us waste our minds occasionally, if not frequently. When we allow anxiety or material things or irresolvable conflicts or any particular issue or grievance to take control of us, we misuse our minds. When anger seethes within us, when resentment becomes uppermost to us, when enjoyment or fun or happiness become the most important factors in our lives, we lay waste to our minds. The mind is the storehouse of the memory, and if our storehouse is filled with the wrong kinds of things, we will damage the protoplasmic vessel which alone can contain whatever we have thought or are thinking.
Thinking is indispensible to the mind. Everyone should engage in a lot of it for a lot of every day. Those who don’t think are likely merely to react, and those who react are likely to be a drag on both themselves and the larger society around them. Reactionary people curtail progress; pensive people create progress.
The best thinking is not easy. It is very difficult. Should I tighten discipline on my child, or should I loosen it? Is what a particular political candidate suggests wise, or is it unwise, and either way, why? Are people basically good, basically bad, or something in between? Why does So-and-So consistently rub me the wrong way, and what should I do about it? Does society have any obligation to try to improve the lives of the poor or sick or disabled? Is our national policy toward Russia --- or Iran or China or North Korea or the UK or Canada or Mexico or Zimbabwe --- valid, or should it receive a thorough review?
It might be argued that individually we can do very little to affect very many of those kinds of issues, so why bother thinking about them? Why not concentrate only on matters that we can personally affect or control?
One thing we know we can readily and visibly affect and control is our physical life. Exercise is important, as so is diet, the proper amount of sleep, which drugs to use and which ones to avoid, and so on. If we are disciplined, we can measure whether we are doing right by our physical selves, just by paying attention to what we do each day to keep ourselves as physically healthy as possible.
But what about the life of the mind? Do we spend much time on it? In point of fact, most of us spend most of our time caring for ourselves physically, or being concerned about the myriad of everyday issues we face. We spend relatively little time thinking beyond ourselves and our own personal concerns. However, a healthy and productive life of the mind requires us regularly to think beyond ourselves and to stretch our mental horizons. Those who think too small think too little. Anyone who thinks too small or too little might be mystified by what that statement even means, but those who think big and think much will grasp its meaning in an instant.
Many medical advancements in many fields have increased the longevity of people all over the world, and not just in the developed countries. In the main, that has been a great leap forward for the human race.
However, there is potentially a seriously negative side effect of increased longevity which has an important bearing on the life of the mind. The longer we live, the more likely it is that a growing percentage of us will encounter Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia. And then what happens to the life of the mind?
Having been a pastor who has actively served in the ministry for over fifty years, I have known a few thousand people in advanced years. (For purposes of clarification, I am going to declare that anyone over 70 is in “advanced years.” Thus I place myself in that rarified company.) Following is a thesis I cannot validate statistically, although I am sure some researchers have spent many years studying this thesis. It is my strong impression, thinking about the many older folks that I known, that the ones who always had very active minds are more likely either to stave off the ravages of dementia longer or more effectively to mask their decreasing mental abilities. In other words, if their minds have always been unusually alert, they are more capable of faking their memory loss than those who did not exercise their gray matter as much.
Now I realize that is a very debatable idea which is bound to elicit strong opinions all over the map. Perhaps there is a plethora of data either to support or to refute what I just said. But until beaten into submission with the demand that I retract my thesis, I stand by it.
In any case, I am positive that it behooves people who know they are losing mental capacity to exercise mental capacity as much as they can, just as they would exercise physical capacity as much as possible were they to find themselves losing that kind of ability. The brain is not a muscle, but it is similar to a muscle in that it also needs to be exercised frequently. The old adage “Use it or lose it” applies as much to the brain as it does to legs or hands or biceps or rotator cuffs.
There are two organizations in our community which sponsor short-course non-credit classes. Two or three times a year forty or fifty choices of lecture courses are offered to the participants. They usually consist of either four or six lectures on a particular topic, or just single lecture about one topic. Several hundred people, most of them so-called senior citizens, attend these lectures, and most of the lecturers are also senior citizens.
Lifelong Learning and the Oscher Center provide outstanding nourishment for the minds of the students who attend these classes. They are thinkers all, at least to one degree or another. They don’t all think alike, nor do they agree on most things. In fact they disagree on many things. But the point is this: they think. They stretch their gray matter. They broaden their interests, and in the process, they become more interesting, although the latter is a side effect rather than the primary purpose of the programs.
Here is a question for everyone who is or ever shall become old. Which is better, to be agile of mind and debilitated of body or to be agile of body and debilitated of mind? Obviously it would be even better to be very agile of both mind and body and to die in one’s sleep at age ninety-seven or one-hundred-three. The latter scenario is a very rare scenario, however. Most older folks have a) a good mind but a broken-down body, b) a functioning body but an impaired mind, or c) a bum body and a compromised cerebrum.
Physical therapists are trained to assist their patients of all ages to re-learn the use of muscles, bones, or nerves which have been damaged, often due to accidents. But it is we ourselves who are --- or should be --- our own mental therapists, in the sense that we exercise the mind as well as we can as we go through the aging process. The loss of both physical and mental functions is noticeable to the older person as well as to those around that person, but it is the person him/ or herself who has the greatest capability of strengthening and elongating the life of the mind. Each of us is her/his own best advocate for nurturing and caring for that living computer which we call the brain.
So - - - When we are getting older, and we finally admit that we are getting not only older but that we are at least semi- if not actually-old, what should we do? Following are a few suggestions for enhancing the life of the mind when the mind is getting a tad slow or rusty.
ONE. Read. There is no activity which is better for the exercise of the mind than reading. But read good literature, not just any literature. Read a daily newspaper, especially the news stories. Keep up with what is happening in the world. Read books. For older people, they preferably should be paperback ones that are not too heavy in weight but also are not too light in content. Read both non-fiction and fiction, but in fiction, read authors whom you know to be excellent writers rather than supercilious scribes of popular pulp.
Think about what you read. Mull it over; ponder it. Agree with the author when you agree, and argue when you feel you must argue. Let the author know your thoughts about what has been written. God forbid that you should think you actually hear the author’s rebuttal, but you will have served yourself well by declaring your affirmation or protestation about what the author has said.
Write yourself notes about what you read in the margins, if what you are reading belongs to you and not to the library or someone else. Underline passages, if the literature belongs to you. Re-read your underlines when you finish the magazine or book, or do it months or years after you finished reading it. All of these exercises stimulate the brain, and that is all to the good. It is what the life of the mind is all about.
My primary mentor in the ministry told me that if I wanted to be an effective preacher, I must read, and read widely. It was one of the best pieces of advice I ever received. On countless occasions reading has provided major foundation stones for every sermon I ever preached. At my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, there is a large fountain between the main University Library and the Wisconsin State Historical Society Library. Around the inside circumference of this fountain are some inscribed words taken from a speech of a 19th century university luminary. They declared, “Teachers and books are the fountains from which all knowledge flows.” What a profound proclamation! Keep learning, geezers; it will impede rapid geezerization! Teachers and books are the fountains from which all knowledge (or at least much knowledge) flows.
TWO. Do crossword puzzles or play Scrabble or engage in other word games. Play bridge, or other “thinking” card games. Ask someone to read various words from a dictionary, and you spell them. One of the first areas of the brain which demonstrates the wear and tear of longevity or which acquires rust in many people is the Word Niche (my term). The challenge of finding the right word for the right object or situation is a rewarding form of mental gymnastics.
THREE. Go to good movies and watch good programs on television. What constitutes “good?” If something is basically entertaining, it may be enjoyable, but that does not make it good. Spencer Tracy starred in two great movies among many other of his great roles. One was It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and the other was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Both had much humor, especially Mad World. But for substance, there was no comparison. World would never claim to be anything other than an unusually lengthy highly entertaining comedy, but Dinner was a thought-piece way ahead of its time, dealing as it did with interracial marriage.
Time is running out for everyone, the newborn as well as the centenarian. But time is really running out for old folks. They need entertainment, but far more do they need movies and television programs which force them to think. Thinking prolongs a fuller, richer life. Mere entertainment relaxes but also can shrivel the mind; substance enhances and enlarges the mind. Everyone, but particularly people who know their time is running out, should fill their minds with substance, lest fluff enters every cerebral crevice and further diminishes the mind.
FOUR. Write letters if your handwriting is still legible. If it isn’t, type or e-mail letters. Correspondence is an excellent means of keeping the mind sharp. However, if the people to whom you write are thirty or fifty or seventy years younger than you, do not expect quick responses, if any. Letters are probably more beneficial for the elderly senders than for the youthful receivers.
Having made four suggestions for nurturing the life of the mind in older people, let me now suggest what NOT to do. DON’T watch too much TV. How much is “too much”? I don’t know: more than four to six hours per day, perhaps excluding sports? (Being a sports partisan is good for the life of the mind, says I.)
Further, if you like watching television, watch good television: network news, cable news (but only in moderation, regardless of what cable network suits your bias), Public Broadcasting System – PBS (choose documentaries, educational series, and British imports rather than Sesame Street; you’re too old for that), Turner Classic Movies - TCM (in moderation), the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and network dramas, as compared to mere sit-coms. We all need entertainment just to get away from it all, but much more do we need mental stimulation to be able to endure it all.
More than a year ago my wife and I moved into a retirement home with which we have been familiar since its inception over thirty years ago. Retirement homes are not everyone’s cup of tea, as many parishioners through the years have strongly reminded me, and that is obviously a completely valid choice. For us, and especially for Lois, this transition has been an unmitigated pleasure. I will not take time to tell you why, but I do want to describe a couple of the people we have encountered there.
A man I shall call Richard marked his hundredth birthday several months ago. Richard is almost blind, and his hearing is highly defective, but he sometimes comes to Team Trivial Pursuit on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he is a whiz at answering certain categories of questions, although not those having to do with popular music, unless it might be from the Twenties or Thirties. Every day he dresses like he is going to the Queen’s garden party. He had oodles of lady friends. When people holler hello to him and tell him who they are, his face lights up like the White House Christmas tree. His mind probably is not quite as sharp as it once was; Richard may have lost as much as 2% of his mental acuity.
A woman I shall call Alma is brought to dinner by her aide in the community dining room every evening. She sits with her entourage of courtiers enjoying every minute and morsel. Alma plays bridge regularly a couple of times a week, and regularly substitutes for others when they are unable to play. Alma is a hundred-and-two. Her mind keeps clicking as her heart keeps ticking. For a very long time Alma has played a very long cerebral suit. Who knows: by itself, bridge may have lengthened her remarkably active life by ten or fifteen years.
There are many other new neighbors and friends about whom I could tell you if I had the time or space. Suffice it to say that studies have indicated people who move into retirement communities live, on average, five to ten years longer than those who continue to live by themselves in their own homes. Statistically, the retirement home residents also enjoy considerably better health. What explains that? First, they are likely to have much better nutrition. Secondly, and even more importantly, their minds become much more active because of their socialization with others and their participation in activities that stimulate the brain.
To live as long as possible with as much health as possible, the life of the mind may be the most important single factor we can pursue. Mental activities in retirement years are the type which in all likelihood shall do the most to enhance the quantity and quality of those years. Remember, geezers of the world: To coast is to dive, but to think is to thrive!
The Old Philosopher, John M. Miller, is a still-active clergyman who has been preaching for over fifty years. He lives on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
© 2016 John M. Miller