Mind Food

I was preparing an entry about nuts for today (yes, they are great for you!) when a friend sent me this article from The New York Times – Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?.

I’m sure the above doesn’t apply to anyone reading this blog, but one of the article’s featured authors Susan Jacoby (“The Age of American Unreason”) mentions how she tried to turn off the TV for a week and how difficult it was for her to do so.

Food is more than just what we put in our mouths to nourish our bodies. It can also be what we put in our minds and hearts. Spring is coming up, and so there will be lots of chatting about “spring cleanses” in the nutrition world, but a “media” cleanse can be a good thing to do for a week.

A media cleanse can be mild or more strict, whatever you feel up to tackling. You could simply take a week off from the morning paper, internet news surfing, and the nightly news. Observe yourself. How do you feel after a week of no disasters, disease, body counts, etc. Or you can go wild and try a week without TV. For those of you who like to live life on the edge, push the envelope a little bit further and see what life is like without TV, books, newspapers, and internet surfing. The important part of the process is to notice what happens and how you feel. Perhaps you will feel more energetic and creative after a rest from all the bad news of the world, or perhaps you never really understood the role that entertainment plays in your life.

If at some point you feel that you are ready to start peeling paint off the walls, remind yourself that this is an experiment and that it is temporary. In our modern world, it isn’t as easy to go off into the wilderness as it used to be, and a “media” cleanse can be a way to explore our inner wilderness for a brief period of time. When you come back to civilization, you’ll see it with new eyes — and won’t that be interesting?