My wife’s grandmother made divinity. Not everyone can do that well, by any means. If you don’t know what divinity is, it’s like a cross between marshmallow and nougat: light, fluffy, sweet and sometimes nutty, especially pecans. When Mammaw made divinity, she had to first look outside and see a completely clear sky — crystal blue and not even the faintest wisp of cloud.

Today, my mind is like the divinity sky: clear, blue, not even the hint of airborne water vapor. Perfect mental weather for making something ethereal, more shadow than substance, yet memorably sweet.

The chemistry of divinity candy seems mysterious and not widely understood. Some people say corn starch is required, others add vinegar to break down complex sugars into simpler sugars, which form something like a plasma when cooled, instead of crystallizing. Some say it’s just a supersaturation trick: If you get the temperature up high enough, you can get more of the ingredients to dissolve in the solution than can possibly stay there at room temperature. But if you then let it cool undisturbed, it won’t crystallize or come back out of solution. Eventually it forms sort of a hybrid state of matter, somewhere between solid and liquid, but much tastier than jello.

The human brain is at least as big a mystery. For all the mysteries of the universe we try to unravel, the most mysterious is mystery itself, a concept we invented in brains that are more mysterious than anything else we’ve yet encountered in the universe. And also sort of a strange, electrical plasma, if you get right down to it.

The brain isn’t precisely binary. I’ll spare you the neurochemistry, but the elements that make up your brain — neurons — are basically long ladders of yes and no, or more accurately, not quite yes and not quite no. Let’s say you have an experience as a baby, and it goes badly. You’ll encode that as bad, something near “no.” As you grow up, you learn that experience isn’t always bad — sometimes it’s good. Your brain attaches another neuron to the first encoding that pushes the overall voltage of the synapse closer to yes. Over time, you’ll have good and bad experiences, and every time you have something that doesn’t match what’s already encoded, the memory becomes more complex and nuanced.

Sometimes related issues get involved. Let’s say as a baby, you encoded spinach as yucky. A few years later, you try spinach that isn’t baby food and it’s not so bad. Another linkage is formed that pushes the net voltage a little away from “no.” At age 12, you try your grandmother’s spinach soufflé for the first time; it’s delicious and you have it every Thanksgiving. Then as a teenager, you try some spinach from a salad bar at a local diner, and the spinach is bad and makes you nauseous.

Here’s where it gets complicated. You were already a little on edge about this place with dirty tables, a dive in general disrepair. One or both of two things happen: You develop a little more dislike for spinach, and/or you vow never to eat at this place again. But that dislike doesn’t stop you from craving the spinach at Grandma’s, and as she gets older, you ask her to teach you the recipe so you can make it yourself and carry on a family tradition.

And that’s just a sliver of the complexity of our brains.

The miraculous thing here is that an initially binary brain becomes a nuanced emotional engine. In short, emotions are the sum total of our experiences, weighing in as best they can against the apparent shape of the current situation, interpreted across millions of variations and hundreds of related encounters. They are neither prescriptive nor prophetic, merely our brain’s best guess based on everything available to consider.

And yet there is another part of us that weighs in on these matters. The part that recognizes the reality of the situation and makes choices. In other words, there are multiple modes operating at once.

Yes, that’s right, we’re more than just emotions. They’re just one part of this equation. From the same neuronal mass, we get cues, ideas, logic, readiness messages, and tons of other predictive information. Our brain is comparing every type of input available to past situations where these input values matched or came close to where they are now. In a sense, our brains are predicting the weather, but in a much more complex way.

By the way, negative emotions aren’t bad. The gains we get by remembering this are immense. Freedom to think openly, not fearing to consider things because they might drive you into a trance. Or send you down the path of a doomscrolled fad. When you understand that emotions are not correct in and of themselves, but a judgement made by accumulated experiences so far, you’re ahead of the game. Emotions are only as valid as the input events and the various nuances of your particular life that have influenced them. What they are giving us is a signal, not a certainty.

There are still lots of flinch points in my emotions, for example, things I won’t attempt because of a disastrously damaging upbringing and some really aggressively selfish relationships as a young adult. I have to fight them every day, and I certainly don’t win all the time. But I have a secret weapon.

I can add more experiences to the system.

Adding positive experiences, especially under relatively controlled conditions, improves our thinking faster than a year of new-age, self-help books. Granted there’s a heavy backlog at my age, probably the roots of the old saying about old dogs and new tricks, but it still works, even for me.

If we want our judgement to be better and broader, the prescription isn’t mantras or self-help books or gurus, but new experiences. This gives our mind more material to work with, by changing our neural net — literally altering our very essence.

This is why books are so important, and why it’s not good to limit your books and media to one genre. And this is why cults, religions, and autocrats all want to limit your exposure to experiences. If you think too clearly — if you have too many reference points — you might not stay within the boundaries they want to set for you. And those boundaries are important for their survival.

This is where I have to praise the Amish. Before their children can join the church, they must first be considered young adults, and go through something called “roomspringa.” At the age of majority, they are sent into the world to experience everything the world has to offer. They can return or not, their choice.

As it turns out, most do, since the Amish way of life is (1) functionally complete, and (2) not forced on anyone. One could argue brainwashing in the sense that eighteen years of accumulated neurons can’t be undone in a couple of years, but contrast this with what college does to many young men and women from “good” homes, and you’ll see my point. The late teenage mind is probably the most malleable of all.

So the quest of life isn’t just about sustenance or survival or raising a family or keeping up with the Joneses. It’s also about new experiences. You can’t take a vacation every week unless you’re independently wealthy, but you can read about a new place every week for the price of a library card. You can join clubs where the admission fee is something other than money, like a book club, or a garden club, or…. You see my point.

And while you’re at it, don’t decry your limitations. I absolutely refuse to jump out of a perfectly good airplane unless I have a garden hose or a long extension cord handy (they’ll get caught on something on the way down, guaranteed). That’s not negotiable unless I’m with Superman and I have a parachute. Backups R Us.

I do severely underrate my limitations. More to the point, I often fail to appreciate the framework they provide. Limitations provide landmarks that prevent me from becoming random and help me become remarkable.

So get your hesitation in trim. Try new things. Read a lot, especially fiction, in a genre that interests you. Never miss an opportunity to meet someone, and try hard to be a good friend, even if you’re distant. Try hobbies. Try sports. Try anything that feels relatively safe and doesn’t have tremendous costs associated with it. Trust me, it’ll help with all those moods you’re having.

Burn slow. Build deep. Be the proof.