Nurturing Mind Fruit

The fruits of your mind are actually your most valuable assets.

Don’t believe me?  Try going through life without them.  You can have all the money, riches and land you want, but not a single valuable idea.  How do you think you will do?

Your paintings, drawings, the music you create, your writings, ideas, designs, software code, technical diagrams, etc. are your mind fruit.  They are your intellectual outpourings, sometimes referred to as “intellectual property”, in legal language.

I’ve always thought it strange to call it “property”, because if you sell it, you still have it and the buyer never fully has it.  You can build on it, but only with more ideas, not a house.  That said, some people have bought some very fine houses, on the strength of their intellectual property.

Nobody else will nurture and grow your mind fruit for you.  You have to do it yourself.  You have to fertilise the ground where they grow, tend the trees, prune the dead wood judiciously and pick the fruits when they are ripe.  Pick them too soon, or too late and they rot away.

Think of time spent taking care of your ideas and seeing them through to reality, via your skills, imagination, taste, intelligence and creativity, as investments in your personal mind fruit orchard.  The more you tend to it, the more productive it is and the more bountiful the harvest.

Sometimes it can be hard being the lonely farmer of mind fruits, stuck in your own orchard, with nobody else visiting or around.  How can you be sure you’re growing these fruit correctly or optimally?  It is especially hard when life events make your enthusiasm, for producing anything, vanish completely.  Keep tending the fruit, believing in the bounty of your harvest that will surely come.

You can suffer setbacks.  Sometimes, people come into your mind fruit orchard and steal all the fruit, or there can be bad weather, spoiling the current crop.  In these cases, all you can do is wait for the next crop.  There is no point trying to sell hail-damaged mind fruit.

One of the few things that can distinguish us, as individuals, is the quality and quantity of our mind fruit.  It is as sure an indicator of your individuality and uniqueness as anything can be.

Imagine if farmers or fruit growers had no representation in the corridors of power.  How would they fare, as producers of fruits and edible goods, if nobody cared about their interests, where laws are made and taxes set?  Not very well, I suspect.

Innovators and those with inventive talents, or high levels of creativity, have never had a political lobby or a party that represented their interests in government, or in setting the rules of economic engagement and commerce.  We’ve always been outsiders, on our own, while moneyed interests, land owners, rentiers, speculators and bankers have always had their representatives, ensuring that laws were drafted, enacted and enforced, according to their best interests, as they perceived them.  What they never appreciated was that mind fruit was the most valuable commodity of all.  In framing it as of secondary importance, they have effectively prevented its flourishing and development, for the benefit of the whole community.  They’ve missed out on a juicy, delicious treat.

Some people will not be interested in all of your mind fruit.  What do you do with the rest of it?  What can you use the surplus bounty of your mind fruit harvest for?  Do you let it wither and rot, or advertise it, looking for others that will perhaps value it?

Perhaps you can preserve it.  Perhaps your mind fruit can be used as a fine ingredient in somebody else’s confection, even if never eaten raw and whole.  There are a lot of different ways to use mind fruit.

They will want you to part with some of your mind fruit for far less than it is worth, so that they can enrich themselves on the back of your mind fruit.  It’s OK to give away mind fruit to people you love, or to give somebody a tantalising and succulent taste of the fruit, but it is a bad idea to give away the entire harvest, for no consideration or compensation.  It also might be a good idea to share your ripest, juiciest fruits sparingly, until you get a commitment to taking the lot.

Mind fruit cultivation takes brain juice – an injection of new ideas, from time to time, fluidity of thinking (nothing grows without fluid, after all) and some new perspectives.  You can fertilise the fruit with input from other fields, books, journals, web sites, opinions, blog posts and so on.

This blog tries to provide brain juice to help you cultivate your own mind fruits.  It’s my own blend, but I hope it is nutritious and fertile, all the same.  I got the recipe from my ancestors.

Of course, having grown all that fresh, delicious, nourishing and precious mind fruit, you have to pick it, wash it, polish it, prepare it, carefully pack it and present it to others, in saleable and manageable containers.  You might have to take it long distances to find people that will enjoy it.  That’s the really hard work.  That’s what takes an inordinate amount of time and energy.

Here’s to your bountiful harvest!