A Mind Stretched

There’s a quote that has been attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr:

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Holmes was a member of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century, although there were far more prominent members like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who expressed the core beliefs of the movement in his poetry and essays. In essence, Transcendentalism emphasized the importance of individual reasoning over following dogma.

There was an inherent goodness in humanity, and human beings were able to use intuition in order to draw their own conclusions. In order to think clearly, the Transcendentalists emphasized, it was important to be self-reliant, as Henry David Thoreau epitomized by living by himself for two years, then writing about it in Walden.

These ideas lined up well with the ideas of the scientific revolution, and its insistence on making careful observation in order to verify any idea. Dogmas and mindless conformity had to fall.

Naturally, lots of Transcendentalists were abolitionists and women’s rights advocates on the more progressive side, and this aspect called to me during my late teenage years like a beacon connecting two centuries.

This sort of DIY (Do It Yourself) ideology was present in the punk community of the early 1990s, where there was a strong feeling that any attempt to work with a mainstream music label would completely defeat the purpose of the art.

If this sounds self-defeating and limiting, it certainly was for many punk bands, but only in the same way that it limited the careers of Emerson and Thoreau—they felt that the trade off was well worth being less socially connected, and that any compromise of this sort would completely ruin the point of the art.

I felt that way, too, when I decided to look like a punk for a number of years, excluding myself from all sorts of activities and social gatherings by default. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to antagonize everyone I met, so much as wanting to exclude myself from a society that would automatically exclude me because of the way I looked.

This was just the start

My mind had been stretched by the likes of Emerson, who seemed to stand alone against a tide of conformity when he wrote: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." It was also stretched by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, writing about Halloween:

You're dressed up like a clown
Putting on your act
It's the only time all year
You'll ever admit that

These movements stretched my mind and caused it to examine the world through a different lens, and once your mind is stretched, it never does shrink back.

The thing about stretching your mind is that it’s easy to go too far in one direction, like focusing too much on one muscle group. You don’t want to end up with arms like a gorilla and legs like a stork.

Understanding how and why people are marginalized by the system is incredibly important, but it’s every bit as crucial to understand why the system exists in the first place. Instead of merely shaking your fist at things that seem perplexing, go and learn about why they are they way they are.

When you get mad, get curious. Remember the parable of the drunken octopus, and realize that you can figure pretty much anything out.

And, keep in mind that most important piece of advice the Transcendentalists put front and center: that you are the true arbiter of any ideas.