April Ambles: Sanity
Reflections of a Philosophical Forager — Day 4
When nothing seems to go the way you planned, when your accounts don’t balance and your unopened mail is stacked a foot high, when the news makes you want to scream, what do you do?
How about this: Stop what you’re doing! Do something else! Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
One year I home-schooled my daughter. When she stagnated, I would send her outside to run around the house three times. Or I would teach her a fiddle tune. It worked. She now has her doctorate, and sometimes she pulls out the fiddle and plays those old tunes for comfort.
When I stagnate I head for the woods. Or play a tune, or sing a song, or dance a few steps, or pull a few weeds from the garden.
Singing is especially wonderful in the return to sanity. There is something particularly healing about the vibration of a melody, and if you happen to play a guitar, the resonance of the wood against your body is enough to melt the craziness that may have been lurking in your monkey-mind.
A familiar book can also be a return to sanity, a book we may have read time and time again because it makes us feel like who we are. Its characters are friends, never mind that we have never met them. They are as real to us as the people we pass in the streets, and more real than many.
In a day when the world reels with events that defy our comprehension, we must find our own wells of sanity. What are yours?
For more amblings from the author, check out Child of the Woods: An Appalachian Odyssey.
