Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, of course, and so I began with my customary Thursday greeting, which takes some form of “Hello and good morning”.  I have occasionally varied the specifics of that a bit—at least once going so far as to write “Goodo and hell morning”—but it tends to stay the same.  Likewise, on Thursdays, I end my blog post with a farewell that I took from Tigger (not from the A. A. Milne stories but from the Disney adaptations):  TTFN, which stands for “Ta-ta for now”.

Anyone who has followed my blog for a while probably knows all this already.  Still, since I can at least have a little hope that maybe some new people will come to read my blog, it’s nice occasionally to let them know about some of the relatively consistent things I tend to do.

Speaking thereof, on Thursdays I also tend to title my blog with some quote from Shakespeare, altered to replace one of the words in the quote with some form of the word “blog”.  Sometimes I have to squeeze the word in pretty brutally, but other times it works really well.  Fortunately, Shakespeare had more quotable lines than pretty much anyone else or even any other relatively circumscribed collection of people, at least in English.

Now that we’re past that introduction of sorts, I should try to write about something more interesting.  I don’t know what that might be or whether I will succeed, but I will try.

I’m still not feeling very well, though I think I may be on an upward swing; I still have a bit of a sore throat and a bit of a cough and all that.  Also, my hearing is persistently hosed in the left ear as it has long been in the right*, with associated tinnitus.  I fear that may be permanent.  There’s not much to do about that.

Because of those issues, I’ve recently been avoiding using my earphones, so I haven’t listened to any podcasts, let alone audio books.  It’s possible I’ll avoid them for good, but I may return to them, or I may elect to go for headphones rather than insertable ear phones.  I prefer the wired kind to any possible wireless ear phones, partly because they tend to stay in place much better than free-floating little ear inserts, but more because they don’t have to be charged all the time.  It’s bad enough to have to keep recharging the stupid phone.

I really wish I could be less tense than I normally am without regressing into depression or having to rely on some manner of pharmaceutical.  I mean to try to get back into regular, daily (or more frequent) meditation.  I know that I’ve said—truthfully—that it often tends to make my depression flare when I start to meditate again, even as it truly helps my anxiety and the erratic, chaotic nature of my thoughts and emotions.  But perhaps I should just accept that and go with it.  I rarely find depression completely debilitating, though it is often life-threatening.  But that’s as may be.  Life is life-threatening.

But I do want to clarify my concentration back to earlier, better levels.  I’m full of ideas for things to do in my immediate future, such as meditating and working on my stories and adjusting my diet and walking more and learning more about all things, all that stuff.  They are good ideas.  But I almost always get distracted by some new thing from even a good preceding thing, much as I used to do when writing stories.

It’s been said that wisdom is the ability to follow the advice you would give yourself if you were someone else.  It’s not nearly as easy as it seems it ought to be.  That’s because humans—and humanoids—are still very much biological organisms with billions of years of potent evolutionary heritage that shapes the moment-to-moment states of the nervous system, rough hew them how we may.

But there are ways to have more control.  I used to do self-hypnotism/meditation every day, a couple of times a day, starting from when I was in junior high.  It was also starting at around that time that I began to do very well in school (to be fair, I was never a bad student, but my performance improved significantly after that).

Once I left that practice behind, becoming distracted by things like college and my soon-to-be-wife, I think my mental discipline and my ability to bring my mind to task as desired deteriorated.  I suppose it’s analogous to an athlete who stops exercising and gets out of shape.

But it’s possible to get back into shape, and the brain is more amenable to improvements—more “plastic” to use the biological/medical term—than are the muscles and connective tissues of the body; you’re never really too old to improve your mind until you’re dead.

So, I mean at least to try to get back into some habits that have been useful to me in the past.  And it cannot hurt to explore the reaches of my mind—though as I make clear in Outlaw’s Mind, this is not always guaranteed not to come with dangers.  Of course, that’s a fantasy/horror story, so there are occurrences in it that, as far as we know, cannot be encountered in real life.  But that doesn’t mean there are no dangers.  For instance, as I just pointed out, mediation sometimes triggers worsening depression for me, and that depression is dangerous (to me).

It’s not as though I’m doing great otherwise, however.  And though it is true to say “all improvement is change, but most possible change is not improvement”, there are situations in which one is in the negative so far that there may be a greater chance of improvement that deterioration.  If one does a “drunkard’s walk” with a barrier preventing motion in one direction, like a figurative large brick wall one cannot get through or around or over or under, and one is already near that wall, random motion is unlikely to get one much closer to it, but can readily take one farther away.

That’s a ham-handed metaphor, I guess, but I suspect you know what I mean.  I’ll try to keep you all posted on whatever I do and what effects those actions have.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*That sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?