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I have a history of acting out. It started a short time after my parents’ divorce and resulted in my spending a summer at a special day camp for kids with “issues”. I wanted to talk a little about that. My acting out took the form usually of tantrums, tantrums induced by my teams losing. This included both my little league baseball and basketball teams and the professional and college teams in my town. Losing equaled an opportunity to blow up. And I took it. I took it and took it. It’s about power. After all the years, all the games, the heartaches, the hope, the praying and the fretting for all that mattered in my life: my mom, my dad, my brother, aunts and uncles and even my cat(s), I’ve come to realize it was always about power. Having it, not having it. What am I talking about? I’m talking about what leads to mental health issues. At least what leads to most of mine. For a long time I’ve had an ambition, a goal. It was a goal I began to put together in high school. It has stayed with me. Over time that ambition became something of a vision, something I felt I literally had to achieve. Without going into details, since we all have our goals and things we need to achieve, I’ll say that it is something I still feel with the same fervor I did 35 years ago. Which means that it’s been 35 years, and it’s still not done. I’ve been a sports fan most of my life. It started with baseball, moved on to football and has flirted with hockey and basketball (sports I can’t play as well). As a kid, I spent evenings listening to the radio, following the local teams. I’d get emotional about it. I’d want my guys to win. They wouldn’t often and I would live with that. Sadly. Toughly. I’d go to school the next day and be alright. Though for awhile there my mom was concerned I was getting too involved, too upset when my team lost. She even sent me away to a special camp one summer for kids with emotional issues. Well, my last post was a bit of a rant so I wanted to scale things back this time and try for a more meditative view of a subject. Once again it’s mental health (they all are) and this time it’s more pointedly about just what mental health is. Try as I might, I still cannot quite suss it out. Perhaps it’s like pornography. You can’t describe it, but you know when you see it. Perhaps it’s an attitude, a confidence or a sense of reality that someone has that somehow “feels” true. I really don’t know. I’m not trained. But even those trained aren’t always that healthy (are they?), which doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re trained to know. It just means you can’t always practice what you preach. For the last 30 odd years I’ve been noticing the devastation of college towns by the minions of former students like myself, adults seeking to reconnect with their college experience. This influx of wayward grownups has all but ruined Harvard Square, turned it into “glitz central” catering to no culture whatsoever and certainly to no student needing things inexpensive and a world that is there for him and not a CEO. Ever since I saw the words “Healthy Choice” emblazoned on a box of frozen food at my local supermarket, I have been wondering what indeed makes up a truly healthy choice. According to the packaging that day, a healthy choice was a frozen convenience food possessed of less calories and more nutrition than your typical Swanson fried chicken dinner. The packaging said I would achieve health in terms of trimmer waist line, higher energy level and better general wellness, if indeed I was prepared to shell out the extra few bucks for it. Back in the day, I worked at a place called The Coffee Connection. CC was an institution in Harvard Square, a progenitor of fine blended coffees that was eventually swallowed up by Starbucks. CC had great coffee and by great I mean actual Jamaican Blue Mountain at some $28.00 a pound. Also they carried Celebes, Moca Java and other terrific coffees from all over the world. Columbian, which most of us these days consider good, was cheap, along with French Roast, which was relegated to the touristy café au laits. It was a place of rather hip and somewhat jovial snobbery. When I was in college, I took it upon myself to write a critique of Percy Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” as a treatise on the inner-workings of a mind as it contemplated a memory. Shelley’s poem was a recollection of seeing the Vale of Chamonix in Savoy. Now, anyone who has studied poetry will know that writing about how a mind works is not an unusual topic for the Romantics (see Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” for example), but what I did that was different from what I’d seen before in critiques was to connect Shelley’s vision with what I’d learned on another front, i.e., that the right brain tends to be the home of spatial and emotional thought while the left houses language and linear thinking. Picture yourself on a beach, all alone, the sun beating down on your body. The only sound you here is your breath going in and out of your lungs and the sound of the waves crashing against the shore. Your mind is completely free with just a few simple thoughts coming and going. As you take a breath in and release it out, you can feel all of the tension and stress leaving your body and floating to the sea along with the waves. You experience complete relation. This is meditation. |
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Copyright 2009 Carolina Partners in Mental HealthCare, PLLC |
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