When you look up ‘mind’ in the dictionary, the first definition presented is:

“the part of a person that thinks, reasons, feels, and remembers.”

It is a whole-hearted belief of mine that if you asked people how to define ‘mind’,

They would know its definition, but only a quarter of it, only twenty five cents worth.

A sharp line would cut off their voices after the word ‘thinks’, leaving ‘reasons, feels, and remembers’ hanging off awkwardly and unimportantly. 

All too often it is forgotten that the mind can do other things besides help us through history tests and recollect for us the quadratic equation:

negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four times a times c ALL OVER two times a 

 

That’s the twenty five cent mind that is held up on a fractured pedestal, forced down our throats and told to be the answer to everything. 

Interestingly enough there isn’t much reasoning, feeling, or remembering

involved in spewing out facts and data that go on pieces of paper that get stamped

with a yes or no ticket to the train that takes us, hopefully, 

to where we want to go later in life.

 

The danger comes when people forget that there is another seventy five percent, 

three more pieces to the puzzle. 

I see it all around me, I see it in my friends struggling to reason between

saying yes and saying no, desperately trying to feel excited or sorrowful

for something other than test grades, pleading with their pasts to remember

what it was like to imagine.

 

But then when it comes time to write essays and explain ourselves in 

applications, interviews, and meetings, that's when you want us to give you

the one hundred percent. 

You’re very happy to ignore our reasons, our feelings, and our memories, 

until you have to figure out what type of person we are. 

I know it bugs you that we can’t fit into the quadratic equation but that was meant for numbers and I refuse to turn into one. 

 

I’m sorry that Webster left out in his definition that our thoughts don’t color inside the lines, that the shadows beneath the surface of our skull make it hard to reason with what is right, 

our feelings fall not in black in white but in the swirling grey, and our memories don’t just hold nostalgia for a simpler time but they hold pain, regret, pleasure, joy. 

If there was a dictionary big enough to describe every aspect of the mind I would gladly give it to you to help your research into my soul a little easier.

 

Until then, don’t tell me that you can see the whole picture when you’re only looking at one piece of the puzzle, don’t tell me you know who I am based on how I fit into your equation, don’t judge my life, my soul, my character, my mind,

 

By only twenty five cents.