I've long-wondered what it means to be Healthy-in-the-Head .... Some Doc in Vienna (SF) once said that it was "To love and to work" ... to be able to glean gratification from both ... caring/loving relationships with others and the ability to not sully your work ... It's that Season in the Northern Hemi when we plant ... Is it a dirty job? Is it a beautiful one? Planting is not obviously mostly one or the other! ... Then a Doctor in England (DWW) added to the Love-Work formula ... "and to Play," he said. Maybe what it takes to have either of the first two ... Love or Work ... work out well has to do with the ability to play.
It was just a few weeks/postings ago that I mentioned dreaming about Playing Catch with one of my friends, many years ago. I was in love with that game. Ach du Lieber ... I remember my Baseball Glove ... I ordered it through an advertisement in the newspaper ... Six-Fingered Johnny Callison Special ... I think it cost $15 and -- if memory serves me well -- I paid for part of it with ill-begotten gains garnered from my Paternal Grandfather's pants pockets. Poetic Justice or something? In 1997, it was stolen out of the back of my car ... actually the whole car was stolen and then recovered without the glove. I suppose the thieves could tell right-off-the-bat how valuable that glove was. In the 80's, I thought of bringing it in to the Broadway Chrysler Plymouth Dealer where old Johnny sold cars ... Then, it was too late.
But back to where I began ... What does it means to be Healthy-in-the-Head? Well, another Doc, this one in Philadelphia, said that he made people better by teaching them how to play with their feelings ... to associate to feelings rather than acting, raging, spewing or any of the other very human reactions we have. Harold Feldman was his name and he called this "a contribution to human nature." If being ill has to do with having a very narrow band of possible reactions to a feeling, then we get healthier but broadening that band. Ah! It's kinda like playing with your feelings. One experiences the feeling and allows oneself the natural flow of other images and feelings that follow it in your Healthy Head.
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I just closed my eyes and conjured up an image of two young teenagers. Not surprising! I was just talking about it. (I hear-tell that teens, these days, may be doing more -- as they say -- balling than ... playing catch. But this is not a forum for talking about my conjured images about Sex in the Last Quarter ... or, anyhow, not today. ... Hell! The Blog isn't called Old Folk Playing in the Boudoir.) I know ... I know ... that same Doc in Vienna might've seen playing catch ... two folk ... tossing a ball ... in and out of each other's glove as a metaphor for sex. And there was an ethnographer at the University of California (Alan Dundes) who saw most games sexually ... as an attempt to get something in your opponent's end ... What do you do in Hockey and Soccer and such field games? You get the Woo-Woo in the other's crease and ultimately? in his or her end ... or in the net. Hey! The kicker does try to kick his balls right between the uprights. Right?
Anyhow ... I conjured up an image of playing catch. In the darkness of my closed eyes, my mind moved to a Sun warming ... to the thought/feeling of a Summer Sun ... to an angry face with big eyes and nose ... then to another face smiling .... then to a picture of my Daily Planner ... as if to say ...
Howard ... Y'are still working and y'can't Blog the day away!
Try it, if you like. Given half a chance ... closing your eyes and taking away the glare of external stimuli ... what happens? The mind naturally sets out a sequential panorama of images ... each image, by the way, potentially dripping with feeling (Affekt) (at least according to the Viennese Doc noted at the start of this riff who called them vorstellungen ... visual scenarios ... film clips).
Now, you may say that the Unhealthy Head may give rise only to nightmarish images but this is not my experience with folk who are suffering badly. Instead, these folk seem to interrupt the process and get stuck ... fix it ... like a photo is fixed in a bath of chemicals, stopping further development of the image captured by the film camera. (Yeah, yeah ... Many of us Fourth Quarter folk still own film cameras and have a Slide Rule in a drawer ... might not recall which drawer? but in some drawer.)
This came out of a discussion with a friend 300 miles away, yesterday ... another Doc ... this one in Providence ... how Head-Docs tend to get caught in singular theories of what makes up the Healthy Head. And now, I may be doing just that. Hard to tell. Any case, during that conversation I remembered what I think is in the Ethica Eudemia where Aristotle suggested that virtue (health?) is the willingness and ability to recognize that one is typically choosing between two mutually exclusive Goods ... no mean task. Maybe Head Health is resident in the ability to let it rip ... to let the images flow, even when they contradict each other ... how can there be two mutually exclusive Goods without a need to believe that one or the other is arguably better ... more Good! Drs. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young mentioned something that might be similar: Letting Your Freak Flag Fly!
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I reread the above and move between thinking it overly intellectualized or bullshit or interesting or
Overly-Intellectualized interesting Bullshit.
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