{"id":364013,"date":"2025-12-22T06:48:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T06:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/364013\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T06:48:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T06:48:17","slug":"how-to-reclaim-your-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/364013\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Reclaim Your Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Modernists like Woolf developed an attitude, which T. S. Eliot called \u201cimpersonality<\/a>,\u201d meant to reclaim their mental lives from the habits they unknowingly followed. The philosopher Raymond Geuss has a story that captures the idea nicely. Geuss recalls a mentor\u2014a school teacher of his\u2014dispensing advice about becoming a visual artist. \u201cSet aside half an hour or forty-five minutes a day,\u201d the mentor said, and then draw, while ignoring \u201call the exercises and principles and things one might have learned.\u201d Afterward, instead of judging your drawing, look at it and say to yourself, \u201cSo, this is what-I-do-on-a-day-like-this.\u201d That\u2019s not unlike observing how a river looks after a heavy rain, Geuss explains. You might say, That\u2019s how the Hudson looks on a rainy day. And you might notice that this is the kind of drawing you make when you\u2019re sad, or elated, or apprehensive, or when money\u2019s tight, or when you\u2019ve just played with your kids, called your mom, gone for a run, or watched \u201cOne Battle After Another<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Impersonality is one of those big ideas that scholars can elucidate forever. It sounds abstract, but on some level it has a simple meaning: seeing yourself less as a fixed point and more as a container. In her book \u201cTiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World<\/a>,\u201d the writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff identifies \u201cthe self-consistency fallacy\u201d as \u201cthe assumption that \u2018I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.\u2019\u00a0\u201d She suggests making adventurous \u201cpacts\u201d with yourself and seeing where they lead. You\u2019re not a musician, but you can still decide to write a song every week for six weeks; you\u2019re not a poet, but you can still try writing a poem every day for ten days; you\u2019ve never started a business, but you can still sell something on Etsy. Maybe it will turn out that, actually, you \u201care\u201d a musician, writer, or entrepreneur. But why focus on what you \u201care\u201d? It might be enough to find that, for a few minutes here and there, your mind can contain music, poetry, and ambition. Something new can happen in that quiet room.<\/p>\n

Truman Capote titled his first novel \u201cOther Voices, Other Rooms<\/a>.\u201d The book is about a teen-age boy who, after a family tragedy, goes to live in a faraway house with relatives he hardly knows. The title evokes the discovery, in adolescence, that the world is full of strangers with their own concerns; the knowledge that life is full of secret stories and languages; and the understanding that, in society, the voices we know would be drowned out if we could hear the ones that go unheard. It also captures a sense of possible transformation. Of his protagonist, Capote writes, \u201cA flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door.\u201d<\/p>\n

If, like me, you\u2019re decades past adolescence, it can be hard to remember the scary thrill of hearing other voices in other rooms. You may no longer want to hear them: there\u2019s something to be said for laying down rugs, hanging curtains, and listening intently to what\u2019s happening in the specific room you happen to inhabit. Still, feeling a little too well insulated, I\u2019ve had my ear to the wall. I\u2019ve been eavesdropping on my friend J., who\u2019s taught himself a new art form, and on W., a musician I know whose unself-conscious, intuitive creativity I\u2019ve long admired, among others. Psychologists and guidance counsellors talk about role models, but that\u2019s not quite what I\u2019m after. In an essay called \u201cThe Good of Friendship<\/a>,\u201d from 2010, the philosopher Alexander Nehamas notes that our friends don\u2019t necessarily act in ways that inspire us; in fact, hanging out with them often involves activities that are \u201ctrivial, commonplace, and boring.\u201d Nevertheless, our friendships offer us \u201copportunities to try different ways of being.\u201d That\u2019s closer.<\/p>\n

What does it really mean to be in charge of your own mind? In many aspects of life, it\u2019s easier to say what we don\u2019t want than it is to say what we do. We don\u2019t want to be screen-addled, apocalypse-minded nervous wrecks, incapable of reading for more than a quarter-hour at a time\u2014fair enough. But who do we want to be? Maybe we just want to be people for whom that\u2019s a live question. Reclaiming your mind might come down to reasserting your right to wonder what it\u2019s for.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Modernists like Woolf developed an attitude, which T. S. Eliot called \u201cimpersonality,\u201d meant to reclaim their mental lives…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,237,105,197987],"class_list":{"0":"post-364013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-internet","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-the-mind"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}