Notes on the Wandering Mind 6: Wandering as a Countercultural Trial

“When this great one was weaned, he began to wander in his mind…”

– Maimonides on Abraham

I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge feeling happy and vindicated that neuroscience has come around on the matter of Mindwandering. But if Corballis’s interpretation of the Science study is correct, it still preserves an extremely valuable artifact: Wandering often puts us at odds with social norms, expectations, boundaries, and taboos. In this framing, that tension is the very thing that turns the Wandering mind into an unhappy one. I don’t know what number Abraham would have scored on his personal happiness survey, but his life of mind-Wandering towards a deeper understanding of reality, as told by Maimonides, is reliably punctuated with one agonizing bummer after another. 

Was he “happy” living a double life, secretly contemptuous of the ignorance of everyone around him — including his family — while continuing to practice their false religion out of some combination of inertia, insecurity, and fear of punishment? (“He was mired in Ur Kasdim among the foolish idolaters. His father, mother, and all the people [around him] were idol worshipers, and he would worship with them.”)

Was he happy to discover that the “entire world was making a mistake,” that it was his task to stand against it as the solitary witness to a more unified truth?

He began to formulate replies to the inhabitants of Ur Kasdim and debate with them, telling them that they were not following a proper path. He broke their idols and began to teach the people that it is fitting to serve only the God of the world. To Him [alone] is it fitting to bow down, sacrifice, and offer libations, so that the people of future [generations] would recognize Him. 

Was he happy being pursued, nearly lynched, and finally exiled by governing authorities for the crime of teaching and public debate?

[Conversely,] it is fitting to destroy and break all the images, lest all the people err concerning them, like those people who thought that there are no other gods besides these [images].

When he overcame them through the strength of his arguments, the king desired to kill him. 

Big Picture, Wandering is the transformative “source of creativity, the spark of innovation that leads in the longer run to an increase rather than a decrease in well-being.” 

More locally, it can also be a life-endangering  existential ordeal that probably shouldn’t be anyone’s go-to for turning frowns upside-down.