MIND EXERCISES

Mind Exercises

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            When it comes to writing, exercising the mind is important. A strong vocabulary comes from working out with weighty words. Muscular minds. Warmup exercises may involve things like crosswords and scrabble, with spells on the thesaurus and dictionary. Share your drink bottle with your readers. Give them verbal electrolytes.

Like prose on steroids, weighty words and even archaisms can uplift readers, supplying them with a poetic adrenalin rush. Add weights to the bar by saying, e.g. “gird up the loins of your mind” (KJV) rather than, e.g. “with minds that are alert” (1 Pet. 1:13, NIV). In the arena of the Bible, the former stays in its lane. It brings to mind the Biblical picture of a man gathering up his robes lest he becomes entangled when running. “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Heb. 12:1, KJV).

The New Testament word for train or exercise, is from where we get gym and gymnasium etc. It refers to being disencumbered by clothes, even nakedness. As Christians, we are to “be transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Rom. 12:2). Therefore, to think clearly, we need to disrobe our rags of sin to exercise our minds. “But reject profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise yourself toward godliness. For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come” (1 Tim. 4:6-7, NKJV). “I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air” (1 Cor. 9:26, KJV).

Mind exercises produce strong minds that will win gold medals in the verbal Olympics. As writers we ought not to be afraid of introducing freshly coined words into the currency of thought. Mind minting.

For inspiration, test the weight of each of the following examples. These, and countless others like them, have been in circulation since 1611: 

Apple of his eye (Deut. 32.10), the blind leading the blind, (Matt. 15.14), eating one’s words (Jer. 15.16), an eye for an eye (Matt. 5.38), the skin of my teeth (Job 19.20), a thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12.7), the writing is on the wall (Dan. 5.5), bridle your tongue (Psa. 39:1; James 1:26), clear as crystal (Rev. 22:1).