You have a mind like a steel trap. Closed.

I don’t know if I made up that phrase or heard it somewhere and stole it.

I do remember using it many years ago when the fit was upon me and I was writing up a storm. I may have questioned it then.

If I had heard it, it must have been floating around in the general mix. Bubbled to the surface of my awareness from common knowledge, the Public Domain, and thus available free for use without fear of legal action against plagiarism.

Or, if I made it up, then it was mine and I could use it wherever. I do plagiarize myself.

The mind is a funny thing. It borrows or steals from others when it feels empty and can’t come up with something on its own.

We talk about the “empty head,” the “hollow skull,” the “no brainer.” I suspect that “no brainer” usually refers to something so obvious that you don’t need to use your brain, but can also refer to people who don’t have one, are mindless.

The mind works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.

The mind can take us to places we’ve never been, to some that don’t exist and never will, to the past before it’s lost forever.

Sometimes the mind takes over, takes us where we don’t want to go.

Sometimes, redefining inertia, it takes us to a place we never want to leave. I have some experience with that.

One mind can influence other minds. For good or ill.

For ill, and we have too much in today’s world, undeveloped minds that never grew up, arrested development without being arrested, concentration camps empty and waiting for people to concentrate. Juvenile minds that can’t get beyond adolescence, minds that wallow in rape, dimly aware to keep it behind closed doors or secret files, or bury the evidence in the backyard.

Minds fixated on money and power, mathematics frozen on addition and subtraction, unable to graduate to algebra.

Parents still say things like, “Mind your manners!” or “Mind your elders!” or “Mind me!”

“Mind your own business!” I would if I had, but I don’t so I can’t.

It wasn’t just Gilda who said, “Never mind!”

People are vague about “Mind over matter” because they don’t know what’s the matter.

Wallace Stevens gave us “a mind of winter,” and he should know.

The prosecutor said to Oscar Wilde, “Don’t mind your doctor,” and Oscar wagged, “I never do.”

The pinhead student in the cartoon raised his hand and asked the professsor, “May I be excused? My brain is full.” We know it’s not just the chairs and tables that are empty.

“Mind your p’s and q’s” because they look like each other in reverse and you don’t want to mix them up.

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” But you have to have one to waste it.

The mind is the receiving end of metaphor when one says, “I can’t wrap my head around that.”

We live in the mind, and if we’re lucky, we can go out of our mind and feel the sun.

I have a mind that needs constant attention and work. Exercise so it won’t be flabby. Able to choose and live with the choices. Good over evil. Right over wrong. Peace over war. Love over hate.

I love my mind. It’s a work in progress. It lets me know who and what I am, how I got this way, where I’m going.

The career joy of my life was teaching young minds to expand.

And it ain’t over yet.

Just sayin’.