MAD

July 6th, 2020

If someone is mad, does that mean they’ve gone mad?

With all due respect and intended courtesy to those with mental capacities deemed abnormal, the connection here between being mad and having gone mad, is not intended to offend but to examine the linguistic similarity and explore what it means to make good decisions.

It’s a matter of fact that society restricts the possible actions of those with mental disabilities and abnormalities.  The most prevalent restriction is probably a driver’s license.  The ability to drive has a further restriction on everyone when mind altering substances are involved, such as alcohol.  We don’t trust people to make good vehicular decisions while drinking for good reason:  people become quite bad at driving. It would be interesting to see how other mental states affect people while driving.  For example:  should it be illegal to drive a car while very angry?  Perhaps so, considering people have their mental capabilities greatly altered while in a state of anger.  No one is without a lingering regret over how they acted while angry at some point in the past.  We all fall victim to the poor choices made while mad.  Apparently in Germany a hangover is considered a temporary disease.  Perhaps the mental state of rage could be considered as a temporary mental illness.

Sanity is the ability to stay calm.

In fact, it may be permissible to argue that any emotion, if ratcheted to a sufficient degree of intensity might be classified as a kind of temporary illness of the mind, a touch of insanity.  Brain studies reveal striking similarities between people who are newly in love and the signatures of a manic episode for an individual suffering from bipolar disorder.

Shakespeare pointed this out a little while ago, from As You Like It, he speaks through the character of Rosalind:

Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

Shakespeare is probably angling for humor here, but it’s oddly appropriate that neuroscience has unearthed some truth in his observation.  Dare we go so far to say that those experiencing the very highest heights of love shouldn’t drive a car?  Perhaps, but then we’re also leaning towards Huxley’s Brave New World, where all variance in emotional experience is hoovered out of the human population.

The trained ability to peacefully face a maddening situation, or any emotionally intense situation is really the only way to seeing next steps that have a chance of being effective.  Anger and rage, jealousy and envy, embarrassment and shame – none of these are the source nor inspiration of ideas that move our lives forward.  The perverse decisions that can grow from these emotions certainly make for a more interesting life similar to the drama of movies and television, but this is likely not the sort of ideal that many of us would like to shoot for.

Do we improve our life and the lives of those around us when we act while angry?

Would you trust someone who’s gone mad to make good decisions?

Correction:

Would you trust someone who is mad to make good decisions?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SUBVERSIVE SERVANT

July 5th, 2020

The sunshine seemed to waver before it’s sheet of bright blue.  Light breeze drifted along an edge of the garden, and the crisp murmur of deep green leaves joined Lucilius’ realm of appreciation.  Distant taps grew harried and stamped, and Lucilius looked just in time to see the old wooden gate to his garden slammed shut by a friend.  Lucilius noticed one of the old joints in the gate gently fall apart from the crash.  He noted the need for fixing as he breathed in deep and took in the infuriated air of his friend as the man approached.

“Well, hello,” Lucilius said cheerfully.

The man glanced at Lucilius only to confirm the smile on Lucilius’ face.

“Same thing as yesterday, or something new today?” Lucilius asked.

The man’s pacing stopped.  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped.

Lucilius shrugged. “If it’s the same thing as yesterday, it saves you some explanation.”

“No really,” the man doubled-down, “what’s that supposed to mean?”

Lucilius shook his head softly.  “You were mad yesterday… you’re mad today…”

“You saying I’m always mad?”

“It wouldn’t be accurate to say it’s not a part of how you operate.”

“What is this?” the man charged, “yesterday you were kind, you understood what I was going through, and today, I get this snark.”

“You’re right, I should be more consistent,” Lucilius said, “like you.”

“Oh, so I’m always mad?”

“Yea, we just went over this.”

“Why are you doing this?  Can’t you see I’m already I’m angry?  Why are you trying make this worse for me?”

“Well,” Lucilius said, leaning back against the great oak tree of his garden, breathing in, his brow softly rising.  “You seem determined that such anger will show you the way forward.  You entertain it all the time, so it must work for you.  Does it not follow to help you by fueling it a little more?  Get you there faster to the crux of action?”

“Oh so you are trying to make me more angry, great.”

“Figure it might help.”

“And why do you figure that?”

“Like I said, you entertain anger so much.”

“You say it like I have choice.  You think I wanted to be angry today?

Lucilius shrugged.  “Does it really work any other way?”

“Something bad happens, you get pissed off.  With what you’re saying it’s like I want bad things to happen because I want to be pissed off.”

Lucilius dazed off momentarily as he listened.  His eyes came to focus and he found he was looking at the gate at the other end of the garden, now broken.  He smiled limply, and kept the smile as he looked back to his friend.

“How well does it serve you?”

“What?”

“Your anger, yesterday.  Today… Every time something bad happens: how well does your anger serve you?  Does it do the job?  Does it help?  Do you find yourself reflecting gratefully upon the brilliant things you’ve done out of anger?  Because, if the answer is yes, if anger serves you well, then I don’t see much problem.”

Lucilius’ friend merely looked away, squinting at the brighter sight of blue.

“It seems to me that anger serves you much as it serves everyone else.  As a servant of your person, your character, and your life, it seems to serve itself first, provoking you again, beyond the bad bit of life, spurring you on to some other decision to regret, to bitterly reflect upon, and again get angry about.  In that way, anger seems as though it has more foresight than ourselves, planting seeds in the present for a worse future, one over which we’re likely to again become angry.”

The man’s mouth pulled tight against his face as he looked away from Lucilius.  Then he walked away, hurriedly.  And when he opened the gate, his anger interrupted momentarily from the reluctance of the little door.  The man looked to find the damaged bottom dragging on the stone path.  But the resistance only frustrated him more, the realization of what he’d done making it worse.  He tore the gate open and tried to slam it again, but it slid short and stopped as the man walked away.

Lucilius got up and slowly walked to the gate.  He knelt down to look at the details of the break.  He’d been meaning to tend to it for some time, having noticed how weak it’s construction had grown.  It would be good, Lucilius reflected.  It had been quite a while since he’d plied his tools, and now he wondered why, knowing how much he enjoyed the work, now grateful for the opportunity.

INSANE DETAILS

July 4th, 2020

Some details, tiny issues like shoe pebbles, the sort generally reserved as nits for the nitpicker, both urgent and unimportant can persist in a way that seems unsolvable.  Dealing with these pesky details can make a person wonder if they are getting a bit touched in the head, obsessive, certainly at least a little crazy. 

Am I making a bigger deal of this than it needs to be?

Should I move on?

Am I just being a perfectionist?

Problems though, no matter how large or how irritatingly tiny, are antilindy, meaning merely that the likelihood that such problems continue to exist given consistent effort and concern, dwindles.  Problems, by definition, are issues that can imaginably be resolved.  And for this later group of irritatingly tiny details, the deranging emotional adventure we take ourselves through to meet their resolution can seem greeted by an equally strong absurdity that such problems ever existed at all, once solved.

Checking your shoe a dozen times for a tiny pebble can seem patently ridiculous when you finally discover the pain is actually a tiny splinter in your foot.

Such small details are, unfortunately, everywhere.  They stand at the beginning of projects, determined to keep us from ever starting.  They populate the final steps of those same projects, throwing out one extra unexpected step just after you thought you broke through the finishing ribbon.  They exist as pebbles and splinters in shoes.  They in fact join together to create massive problems.

Any problem is, just a web of much smaller problems.

Deconstructing a problem into many can certainly make each problem simpler and procedurally easier to solve, but this doesn’t mean they are any less aggravating.  Fine-tuning anything, be it a guitar or the placement of a graphic or the placement of punctuation, is often easy in terms of what needs to be done.   A little this way, a little that way, then back a little.  But when results are less than ideal, over and over, the repetition of those easy small pseudo-solutions can be maddening.

The real problem in the end is not the arbitrarily elusive solution that we eventually find.  The real challenge is an emotional one.  When it comes to problem solving, intelligence is not nearly as important as patience, and being able to maintain a level head in the face of frustration.

Going through that tense experience of insanity, over and over, can bring us to realms of success that others admire.  But note, the admiration is generated mostly by a lack of patience, and an inability to to mindfully direct one’s own attention in possibly productive ways, over and over, no matter the set back, the frustration and every little insane detail along the way.

MOMENT MECHANICS

July 3rd, 2020

Close your eyes and recall that perfect moment: throwing the gear shift into fifth as that favorite song crescendos, the windows open, the warm air of that summer from long ago coursing over your skin.  Or that wobbling image in the water of a loved one smiling at your noticed reflection.  Or when the trees finally gave way to the view on that hike and it was as though the world had thrown open doors to some hidden beauty, the valley cascading down into the distance as you realized how much of the world seemed beneath your feet. 

What is it about these moments that align, like variables in equations shuttling into place, revolving to align, those ethereal pins of our locked mind meeting their secret heights to turn our perspective onto the majesty of the moment?

Imaginably, there was someone else on that road without a favorite song, having a terrible day, cursing their luck.  And somewhere else someone’s tears shattered their own reflection on another shore, and yet another person winced with the pain of a broken bone, wondering how they might get down off the mountain.

A fundamental question that too few seem to stumble across or seriously entertain:  does my environment determine my internal state, or do I?

There is further an enraged driver whose mindfulness practice finally slips into the experience of their anger, who pauses within the storm of their own rage, for the first time, and breaths, merely breathes and marvels at the whole spectrum of emotion suddenly splayed wide upon their sense of life.  There is yet another, heartbroken but grateful at the chance to have loved, to simply be capable of such depths of feeling who embarrassingly risks a smile, seeing the entire tumult of romance like a treasured book, unique and whispered now only in the private memories of mind that will forever cherish the story.  And still there is a person calming their split nerves with a disciplined attention, suddenly grateful about the nature of their broken bone, realizing how much worse it could be, seeing quickly a solid and fallen branch nearby that has a perfect fork, that will make an ideal crutch once the initial pain has subsided.

What is it in our nature, in our brain and bodies, and from our experience that allows or creates these different experiences?

Is it worth it to wait around for all the variables of circumstance to line up for something like happiness to happen?

Or is there another set of variables, levers to toggle, buttons to push in sequence, habits to practice and thoughts to nurture that allow for a person to transform to the situation, shuttling different mental machinery into place, rotating perspective, oscillating the view of context in order to strike upon the ethereal combination of internal decisions that sync up with circumstance to produce a sense of life unmissed but embraced, no matter how terrible or painful..?

VARIETIES OF NONSENSE

July 2nd, 2020

It’s a feature and a bug that we can understand different varieties of nonsense.  That sentence itself might count as an example.  We need only wonder: is it nonsense if it can be understood?  Isn’t that a contradiction since nonsense is defined as that which can’t be understood?  And yet there are formal traditions and practices involving koans, which are perhaps designed not to make sense in order to further a mental practice.  At the same time, we as a group species occasionally fall under the spell of hysteria where we use mental frameworks rife with contradiction in order to make decisions. 

It’s occasionally said that a wise person is capable of holding two disagreeable ideas in their mind at the same time.  It seems we can say something similar about those who lack wisdom: people are quite capable of holding two different contexts in mind, so long as they don’t overlap in any way that might rouse an inconvenient suspicion of contradiction.

Wisdom, or rather growth as a person is achieved when we let those contradictory ideas and their respective contexts mingle in our mind, battle it out and resolve into a stronger context.

The hypocrite is a person who can’t entertain this internal resolution.  A hypocrite keeps the contradictory notions of their mind carefully separated.  Using each only in turn when it’s appropriate, convenient, and above all: sensible.

The contradiction of the hypocrite is only visible from a larger context that includes both notions.  Perhaps this is what it means to be narrow minded: you can only see and deal with one idea at a time, so the contradiction never reveals itself.  Open mindedness might not be so much about how willing you are to welcome in new ideas as it is having enough open room in your mind to see that some of the ideas in there, contradict.

This definition of narrow-mindedness allows for nonsensical frameworks to function in the short term.  The long eye of history holds in view a larger context by default.  The saying hindsight is 20/20 merely means that our perspective is now wide enough that we can see the contradiction, the mistake…the nonsense of our actions, because we can now see all of the different contradicting parts in one view.

Nonsense either reveals itself or dissolves as we change the scope of our perspective and the size of the context at hand.  Keeping this ability to ‘zoom’ in and out is key to resolving contradiction and creating a perspective that is more in line with a reality that enables us to make things happen.  Counter to ignoring nonsense, we are best served by trying to understand why something seems like nonsense and likewise endeavoring to see if our own thinking and behavior looks like nonsense from a different perspective.