Your Mind is Priceless. Use it, Don’t Lose it!

If you don’t use it, you lose it. My body often shows me that is true. Daily life tells me and when I spent three months in a wheelchair, not only were my injured muscles weak, but my uninjured ones were wimpy from lack of use.
photo © 2010 Camilo Rueda López | more info (via: Wylio)

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That advice is also true for our minds. The more we use them, the better. If I do a few Sudoku puzzles a week, I like the challenge of filling the empty boxes as fast as possible. But if I haven’t done one for a few months, the empty boxes scare me and it takes me forever to finish one.

Along with repeated use, curiosity is important to our minds.     Curiosity is to the mind what coffee is to the writer. Yes, one could live without it, but not as much gets done.

Most of us have a measure of curiosity. We don’t eat the same thing or wear the same clothes everyday. Going to new places can be refreshing. Learning a new skill can make us feel more alive, because it forces our minds to think in new ways.

But if we aren’t intentional, we can settle into routine patterns of doing things with no room for curiosity. Curiosity keeps our minds from becoming stagnant.

Curiosity shouldn’t be confused with being gullible and accepting every idea/fad/thought. A healthy curiosity forces our minds to work, being gullible is the opposite … it means we don’t think through questions, ideas and thoughts. Instead we need to study, explore and examine everything — new and old.

Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

How many of us want to stay within a budget, but yet we go to the mall or the store where we always spend too much? How many of us talk about how busy we are, but then continue to cram our calendars? How many of us want to be healthier and yet every week we buy the same junk food? We act in routine ways because we don’t allow curiosity to imagine a different way of doing things.

Stop and ask yourself why. Why do you do some of the things you do? Maybe it’s time to create some new thought patterns in your mind. Not only would it be healthy for your mind, but it could also help you break a habit you’ve been wanting to break.

Try it this week. Do something new.

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• Try a new recipe.
• Say yes instead of no.
• Say no instead of yes.
• Take time to be still.
• Do a Sudoku puzzle.
• Listen to a different opinion, without interrupting.
• Check out the scenery along a new route to work.
• Read a book or magazine that you normally won’t read.
• Ask why before you do that thing you always do.

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Your mind is priceless. Use it … don’t lose it!

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I’d love to hear what happens. What your curiosity teaches you. Stop back here and leave a comment or connect with me on Facebook, Twitter or email me  - JanetOberholtzer@gmail.com.