Intellectual Metabolism

How do you metabolize the mental input of each day?

The process of metabolizing the food we eat is so familiar we seldom think about it: within a long tube, food is broken down into the energy and raw material that sustain our body - and whatever isn’t useful keeps moving as waste.   

This seems like a great metaphor to inform how we process the vast quantity of intellectual input we consume each day. The conversations, articles, art, and emails (to name a few) are available as energy and raw material to sustain our inner lives. 

Much of my life has involved trying to metabolize diversity and disagreement into wisdom and new perspectives - or pain and failure into insight and motivation. This sort of transformation is important, but it’s only one half of the process of metabolism. The other half - arguably as important if not more - is avoiding the mental and internal blockage that happens when we hold on to what isn’t useful. Our guts have much to teach our heads.