The "verbiness" of terms for describing pain

From a discussion thread on Somasimple, the difference between kinds of pain:

"I tend to think in terms of "persisting" and "resolving". - Sebastian Asselbergs PT

"Aha. I'm starting to get it. Conceiving of pain as a condition like alcoholism where the diagnosis of it being a "problem" can only come from the person experiencing it makes sense.

This is helpful to me. Assisting a patient towards resolution will be more effective if I have an appreciation of how their pain may be working for them. Only when they admit that the pain's not working, and become willing to change whatever behaviors are contributing to its persistence can they start towards resolution. This sounds like the movement from a pre-contemplative to contemplative stage of behavioral change.

Cognitive behavioral therapy principles come in to play here because patients may think their pain is working, but they are often mistaken. They don't see the whole picture, or are not reasoning effectively...because of the pain. Obviously, pain clouds jugdment(sic) and reasoning abilities. It also robs one of options- and the ability to imagine other possibilities.

I like the "verbiness" of "persisting" and "resolving." Conceptually, this supports a more interactional as opposed to operational mode of providing therapy.

I don't want to be a hero for my patients." - John Ware PT

Perfect. Pain as verb, not noun. Pain as a natural process (i.e., something that moves along) for which adverbs might be helpful, not as some static something requiring scads of ever more clashing and diametrically opposed, mutually exclusive adjectives, like "normal" and "abnormal."

Thank you John.

Adverb:
1. a word that modifies something other than a noun
2. the word class that qualifies verbs or clauses

Adverbial: a word or group of words function as an adverb

Parrot provides a bit of novel sensory-discriminative input to a cat

Thanks to Javed Alam at Brain, Mind, Consciousness and Learning blog for this. Such a tender little video.

Canadian Pain Physio Directory

I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Canadian Pain Physio Directory, an initiative of the Pain Science Division of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association. A permanent link has been added to this blog, at the top.

Light, let there be.

I need to rave on a bit about how much I am enjoying the light levels here in Saskatchewan. My own particular very bossy suprachiasmatic nucleus loves being "home" again. Let me try to explain. This first picture is my view of the sky, looking west, about 5:15 PM. We don't change the clock in Sask. That's just point 1.

Where I live is situated 1850 feet above sea level. It's like living at the top of a very very large hill. When the sun comes up, or goes down, the light changes ever so gradually. There is nothing abrupt about this process the way it is at sea level. The sky takes a good half hour or longer to brighten or dim, both before and after the sun has come or gone. I think this gradated dimming/brightening, the slowness of it, the gentleness of it, the non-abruptness of it, is crucial - at least to me. I think it might be why the big fake sun-lamp stopped working for me. My particular suprachiasmatic nucleus took all this for granted the first 33 years of its existence. Then for the next 26 years or so, it had to put up with sudden light changes. They really are more abrupt when there are mountains and sea level blocking light as my brain had become accustomed to it, a brain used to a sky that faded or brightened slowly, so slowly, from very dark to very, very bright. And big. Huge. Dome. Sky. Sky that actually dips down on all sides below the horizon line, letting the sun smoothly illuminate it even when it isn't directly visible. How cool is that? This second picture was take at around 6 PM! There is still enough light in the sky to take a picture without any fancy equipment, just a handheld camera. Not much, but just enough.


Halfway through November, and no SAD. Not one bit of it. Just greater and greater decompression noted each passing week.

More about flu

I wrote a bit about this just yesterday. A number of years ago, while researching what life was like in the early part of the last century, trying to feel the context of the birth of physiotherapy as a profession in the world, I read all about the flu pandemic of 1918, and I must confess, it scared the bejeebers out of me. I don't scare easily - it's just that this thing killed such a huge percentage of the population of the day, and there was no stopping it then like there is now. Like most everything in nature that moves, it came in waves.

There were no flu shots available way back then. It was AFTER, and likely BECAUSE of the 1918 pandemic, which scared the bejeebers out of the entire world, that Centers for Disease Control developed, and vaccines were developed, to try to keep something like this from ever slowing us human primates in our various troops, down, ever again.

I want to grab Bill Maher (and others like him) (gently) and shake him, ask him to wake up, and go to, look at, read the following links. Try to understand the deal here. Ask him to set an example of the right sort.

1. Images

2. Wikipedia link

"The 1918 flu pandemic (commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu) was an influenza pandemic that spread to nearly every part of the world. It was caused by an unusually virulent and deadly influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1."

(H1N1 - did you see that?)

3. Modern strain similar news story

4. The 1918 Influenza Pandemic from Stanford, somewhat scholarly treatment of the issue

5. Mother of all Pandemics

Conversation re: flu

So, this morning I arrived at the Wheatland bright and early to help peel spuds for a catered dinner later today. There were the two main caterers, Ruby and Helen, and Helen's husband John. John already had the potatoes in the sink, had quite a few peeled, so I donned an apron and joined him, with a peeler I brought with me from home, originally purchased at IKEA in Vancouver. It's a great peeler, sharper than most of the ones I've tested at the Wheatland.

Anyway, I asked Ruby how things were going for her. "I'm not going to get that flu shot," she announced, which made me think that she had been thinking about it that very moment. Which one? I asked. "H1N1" she replied. Oh. How come? I asked. "Because I don't think I need it. By the time we get the vaccine here, the flu will have come and gone anyway," she replied. "I'll get the seasonal flu shot though," she added. She continued ripping up several heads of iceberg lettuce for the large salad she was building in an enormous clear plastic rectangular tub, enough to feed 60.

"That's interesting," I remarked as I fished a gigantic potato, a good three pounds, up out of muddy sink water, a potato that still had half a farmer's field stuck to its side, which I set out to remove before trying to peel it. "I came to exactly the opposite strategy after thinking about the whole business. I'm willing to become part of 'herd immunity' for H1N1, because, well, while seasonal flu does kill people, it's usually the really weak and sick that die from it, whereas H1N1 is picking off healthy people, kids. I'm more interested in not being a breeding ground for something that kills healthy people than I am in not being a breeding ground for something that is mostly not dangerous for healthy people." I managed to chop up the three-pounder into about 6 large chunks, each of which I could peel more easily with my small hands and wicked sharp peeler from IKEA.

Ruby replied, "But those people who die from H1N1 must have a weak immune system."

"Actually... my understanding is that they don't, that the virus actually provokes their immune system into over-reacting, and it's their own immune system response that does them in."

Silence. Then, "How are those potatoes coming along?"

"Good. How many pots-full will we need?"

"We'll need about two and a half small pots full, but we'll cook them all in just the big pot. There are only 60 people coming to this. It's not like a regular supper with a hundred and 20 where we need the big pot full and two small pots as well."

"OK then, I think we'll have enough with these four big potatoes we have left to peel here."

Long pause.

Then Ruby said, "I don't know.. I think I'll just go with what the doctor said. He said he thought that by the time the vaccine got here, the flu would have already come and gone anyway.."

I waited an appropriate length of time, then said, "Well... I was thinking about that 1918 flu. I think it arrived in waves. I think it can go away for a bit then come back again... I wouldn't want to be someone who worked for the Center for Disease Control, tracking viruses and whatnot, trying to figure out how to advise as I tried to understand what was happening around the country.. That 1918 flu took out a huge chunk of the population. In those days there were only 2 billion people on the planet, and the flu took out 50 million, something like that.. that's a big percent of the population, and there were no shots for it, no Center for Disease Control, nothing. People died like flies in those days from all sorts of things, but for sure that flu made a big impression..... Do we have enough potatoes peeled now, do you think?"

"Yup. That should do it. Let's go have coffee."

The Red Albatross

Finally, the red Persian rug is gone. I took one last picture of it today, lying in a semi-rolled up heap in the middle of my living room, just prior to the arrival of two men who carted it away, off to the Wheatland Center, where it will either live on the floor of the puzzle room, or else be raffled off as a fund-raiser, a more recent idea Helen, the administrator, hatched. Either way, I'm glad it's gone from my life where it had become a burden, and will have a new life with someone (or someones) else, who will give it a nice home and enjoy it. Plus, if the Wheatland makes a goodly sum of $ out of it, all the better.

Sure is nice to have it gone. A weight feels as though it has lifted. Bye-bye rug, hello more simplicity.

Writing

Mo at Neurophilosophy Twittered a link to a blog called Inside Higher Education: Career Advice, about writing a dissertation, by Peg Boyle Single. It seems she has a book out.

The column is also full of good advice about writing in general. Part 1, A Regular Writing Routine, is a layout of the mechanics. Write whenever you have a chance.

"Motivation in writing comes from prewriting, prewriting, prewriting. Motivation occurs when you have done the necessary planning steps so that when you sit down to write prose, you have had time to subconsciously play around with the ideas and you only have to retrieve and type down the ideas, not to think them up. Motivation occurs when you have a very detailed long outline, filled in with citeable notes, by your desk that guides your writing."

Part 2 is What the Research Says. The first item recommended is to develop "deliberate practice."

"So what is deliberate practice? It is not inherently fun nor is it intrinsically rewarding. It is work. Deliberate practice is effortful practice with full concentration and includes a mechanism by which the results of the practice can be evaluated and improved upon in future sessions. Often a coach or master teacher oversees the deliberate practice, chooses individualized training tasks, and evaluates the results of the training. Experts more often engage in deliberate practice during the morning; research has supported that we have the greatest capacity for sustained, engaged and demanding cognitive activity during the morning. Research has also supported the many anecdotal accounts that four hours is the length of time that deliberate practice can be sustained."

It sounds like training for anything sounds. Start with twenty minutes a day and build up to 4 hours/day. Neuroplasticity will develop the brain. Pattern recognition is enhanced, etc.

"Novice writers tend to focus on the word or the sentence as the unit of creation or as the unit of analysis. Expert writers focus on the whole and on the paragraph as the smallest unit of creation or analysis."

Please, if you want to be a writer, read the entire posts carefully, especially if you have to write something academic. I can attest to how hard it is and how easily one can be chewed and spat out. My first and only (academic) paper so far was a disaster, swiftly rejected by the one and only journal I sent it to. I could not figure out what it was reviewers wanted - if it was a failure merely of style, or if I was simply inept at delivering written content, or if they hated the content itself. I'm still baffled. I could definitely have used this advice a year ago.

I can hardly wait for the next two columns in the 4-part series. Thank you Peg. Thank you Mo.

Selves and selves and selves

By happy fluke a friend, Jon Newman, posted a thread on SomaSimple about Sandeep Gautman's blog, The Mouse Trap, and links to several posts about the many selves we each carry around. I was delighted to learn that someone has bothered to study their existence, hypothesize their functions - I don't have to do it all by myself (haha, lame joke).

Listed below are the particular posts Jon found, and thought were compelling enough to bring onto a physical therapy board. They are compelling, because even when we are tootling along in a well-integrated, functioning state, working for a living providing services to health consumers, etc etc., we are dealing with psyches which might seem glued together on the outside but which might feel shattered to pieces on the inside. I've preferred to see this shatteredness as merely kaleidoscopic, interesting and even lovely, but I can appreciate that a sudden plunge into the depths of self/selves might feel shattering to people at first exposure to it. It was that way for me at first, too.

Anyway, for those interested:
1. Development of Infant Consciousness
2. Splitting of the self: "me" and "I"
3. Five kinds of self/self/knowledge

I had no idea there was a field called Philosophical Psychology, with its own journal, but there is. Someone named Ulric Neisser wrote a paper way back in 1988 and delineated Five kinds of Self-Knowledge. In his blog, Gautman has outlined them:

•The ecological self is the self as perceived with respect to the physical environment: I am the person here in this place, engaged in this particular activity.
•The interpersonal self, which appears from earliest infancy just as the ecological self does, is specified by species-specific signals of emotional rapport and communication: I am the person who is engaged, here, in this particular human interchange.
•The extended self is based primarily on our personal memories and anticipations: I am the person who had certain specific experiences, who regularly engages in certain specific and familiar routines.
• The private self appears when children first notice that some of their experiences are not directly shared with other people: I am, in principle, the only person who can feel this unique and particular pain.
• The conceptual self or ’self-concept’ draws its meaning from the network of assumptions and theories in which it is embedded, just as all other concepts do. Some of those theories concern social roles (husband, professor, American), some postulate more or less hypothetical internal entities (the soul, the unconscious mind, mental energy, the brain, the liver), and some establish socially significant dimensions of difference (intelligence, attractiveness, wealth). There is a remarkable variety in what people believe about themselves, and not all of it is true.

No mention in there of the over-extended self.. which women end up becoming a lot of the time.. I think (with my private self) the over-extended self may house a bunch of the subselves which can cause trouble. Perhaps it depends on the sort of "specific and familiar routines" in which one engages. I think it's the one our "role" is housed within. Of all of them, it's the one that changed itself right under my nose, and seems like is busy plotting a coup with my conceptual self these days.

Also, no mention that I can find of how each of the discretely labelled selves experiences time passing. I have a hunch that a key to re-integrating them is to get them all back on the same clock again somehow.

As an aside, recently neuroscientists found brain cells that keep track of time with extreme precision in macaque monkeys. Everything gets a time stamp. See MIT news story, A Head of Time.

If the brain is an oscillator, predictor and simulator, I can see how easily one's sense of self/selves can develop a few timing problems and need "tune-ups" on occasion.

Looking after me

Once in awhile, a little, formerly struggling part of myself surfaces and breathes, then disappears again for ever-lengthening periods of time. It surfaced this morning, and we took a look at our life together. I found I could understand and look at life from its perspective better than I could before.

It is the anxious part. It's the part of me I fought to stay married to, the part I turned my whole physical existence upside down and inside out to accommodate. I didn't blame it when it threatened to explode - I listened, stayed connected, tried to understand, then analyzed, and then acted. I thought things through while in Hawaii. I related to this part of me.

I do happen to view my "self" as a committee comprised of different characters, a choir of different voices, a community of selves apart from the one I normally inhabit as "me." I'm not sure this is pathological, although it might seem a bit odd. I have always seen my"self" this way, as a group of individual proclivities and interests, some of which can interfere with others at times. I've always seen my "self" as a collective comprised of "selves" of different ages and capacities and likes and dislikes and abilities and inclinations. I do feel like I have to actively integrate all of it ongoingly, most of the time, and need a lot of alone time to deal with it. I do sometimes resent the disproportionate amount of time this seems to take me, compared to how easily others seem to hold them "selves" together, but usually don't allow it to particularly bother me.. I just plug along with whatever I've got going on at the time. I do wonder about aging, how this process will be affected. Will it get easier or harder? Maybe every person feels like a whole tribe on the inside. Maybe others have brains that do this integrating effortlessly and non-consciously (it seems that way from the outside, at least..). Maybe this is way more information than anyone else needs to know about what goes on in my particular head.

Whatever the case, back to the anxiety "self":
It poked itself into my conscious awareness today, to announce that it feels better now, thank you. It noted that it is Hallowe'en today, which means that it's nearly November, a time when life would normally be dark and rainy and foggy, that it would ordinarily be fixated on the weathercaster's daily announcement of time of sunrise and sunset, would be poking me frequently, as daylight shortened and darktime lengthened. It noted that here, in the new place, in the 'land of living skies', the land of planetary hemisphere-size sky, it could care less, pointing out that it has paid almost no attention whatsoever to weather reports. It doesn't care anymore. It has more light and that's all it ever wanted, so thanks. It doesn't feel it needs to intrude on me anymore about light level issues. I agreed. The thank you was mutual. Both of us love the fact that we do not have to re-set the clock, now or forever more, if we don't want to. Saskatchewan very sensibly did away with this noxious stress-producing, imposed from without, jet-lag producing practice many decades ago. Such a relief.

Meanwhile, there are other internal fires to fight... The part I normally regard as the working part of me is still healing from the rippage away of what was once ordinary existence, and sets of daily habits. It has yet to find a new rhythm in life that is as productive as life used to be, but slowly it feels better and better. It knows that the only way to get through the rest of this year will be to get through the rest of this year, doing little more than attending to each moment as a suspended entity, experiencing life as a crawl by.

The part that had been longing for a sabbatical now has one, but experiences time as whipping by too fast to be enjoyed. It's the part which, if I allow, thinks it needs markers, things to weigh time down, to slow it down. Material objects and bought items, "stuff", money-wasting burdensome symbols of ownership, permanence. I've put a stop to most of that. It will have to find some other way to express itself. I cannot even buy a book right now - the wounds of having had to scuttle almost my whole library are still too fresh. I am firmly convinced that, on the whole, simplicity is preferable, but the acquisitive "self" is having a few issues with me over that. So, I might take it out today to purchase some winter boots, get it a flu shot, buy a bottle of aspirin to feed it, one per day, so it feels provided for and I will have simultaneously reduced the statistical probability of this "self" giving us both/all of "us" a stroke.

What I once felt was a somewhat budding and growing intellect is dormant for the time being. I'm still tending it, but it is ignoring "me" at the moment - it seems to need to compost for now. I hope it springs back to life someday. I see no reason why it won't. It's time for engine maintenance, is all.

Addicted to information?

Scientific American has this little item: The Chemistry of Information Addiction: A new experiment reveals why we always want to know the answer

Dopamine reward pathways appear to be involved. This ties in with Robert Burton's ideas in his book, On Being Certain. Certainty becomes a rewarded cognitive behaviour, and voilá, becomes an end in itself.

Excerpt:

QUOTE
"It has long been thought that there are two levels of decision-making: a conscious level taking place in the cerebral cortex and an unconscious level in the basal ganglia. The story is not so simple, he says, because these two systems are connected via the midbrain dopamine neurons. Perhaps future work will reveal how our conscious and unconscious decisions are influencing one another, all due to this very busy population of dopamine neurons.

It’s often remarked that “ignorance is bliss.” However, when you look at ignorance from the perspective of the brain a very different picture emerges. Our brains, and the brains of other animals, have evolved to find information rewarding. In fact, not knowing is stressful, which is why we strive to decrease that uncertainty whenever possible. We want the information and we want it now!"

So here's a thought, based on something else I read today, Scientists Locate Literacy In The Brain With The Help of Former Colombian Guerrillas, which I think ties in.

(Why they kept referring to the subjects as Guerrillas, instead of referring to them as formerly-illiterate subjects learning to read, I'll never know. Of that I am quite certain.)

Anyway, language is intrinsic. Children left to themselves soon figure out some sort of "language" in which they will be able to communicate. Even deaf children. Such made-up languages will have grammar, structure, meaning, etc.

Reading, on the other hand, is tuition-intensive learned behaviour. It changes the brain. Excerpt:

"Previously, it was thought that the angular gyrus recognised the shapes of words prior to finding their sounds and meanings. In fact, the researchers showed that the angular gyrus is not directly involved in translating visual words into their sounds and meanings. Instead, it supports this process by providing predictions of what the brain is expecting to see."

In lots of other posts here I've taken a close look at this idea, that the brain is a simulator, plays a predictive role based on previous experience. It is the standard science-based working model of the brain.

My thought is, "making stuff up" to satisfy information hungry and addicted pathways, would likely represent the default human capacity.

Science and learning to think scientifically, like acquiring literacy, requires much more input and effort, initially.

However, the acquired skill is self-rewarding, in the same way as reading is.

Reading has become the norm. Like reading, science must be taught, conveyed, and ultimately learned. It's a transmission of "information" between two people, a teacher and a learner, like any sort of information exchange is but more formal - the people are in roles. Effort expended to either learn or teach is considerable.

Something is wrong with how science is taught these days. Perhaps teaching science as a "tool" seems boring and laborious to a child or teen. Perhaps the teachers themselves find it boring to teach science, or can't quite see the point of trying to pound science into what seem like thick heads.

Does anyone else think science could or should be reframed as an exciting, cognitive, future self-rewarding behaviour?

I will lay odds that if teachers took on their task of teaching science as enthusiastically as they take on teaching basic reading, fueled by the same motive, soon there would be a leap forward in percent of population able to steadily access their own information-seeking/gathering reward pathways. New habits of thinking would emerge. Culture would change. There would be no more need in life to support institutions that "make stuff up" just so they can feel they can help people get by - everyone would be interested in investigating the truth as closely as scientifically possible.

Additional Reading:
1. Harriet Hall's review of On Being Certain
2. Ginger Campbell's BrainScience Podcast and shownotes about the book, Episode 42
3. Ginger Campbell's BrainScience Podcast and shownotes, interview with the author, Episode 43.

Weather

It's excellent novel stimuli to this brain that houses me.
Brain food.
Today, outside my window, a blizzard! a real, honest-to-goodness prairie blizzard! ...rages.
Maybe it's the exciting descriptors that pull me so much into this situation, back to living in a little prairie city that has nothing much to distinguish itself.. where any architecture the least bit interesting dates back to the 40's, or 30's.. 20's..

No matter - the weather is wild, the weather is fresh, the weather is waking my brain back up. I do not fully understand why I feel like a coma survivor - I just know that I feel something waking up in here. I'm going to go walk around a little bit out there.

First snow

I feel like a kid again. Just for this feeling, it was worth moving back to Sask. Snow fell last night and this morning, not much - just a skiff, but it feels good. I can feel my sympathetic system stirring after a long long time of not having been stimulated kinesthetically in this way, expecting to have to struggle just a bit. The light levels are strong. So the accommodation reflex of the parasympathetic system of the pupils is back in charge, telling the sympathetic system to not dilate pupils. What a kick this is, light-wise. My brain likes this.

Carl Sagan and Stephan Hawking Duet

Life and jigsaw puzzles

What the heck.
I am back to add my thoughts on this after all.

.........

How life is like a jigsaw puzzle

1. You are born without knowing how to do one.

2. Your job is to complete your puzzle before you die.

Symbolism

Every piece represents another person in your life. Each piece is equally precious, uses equal space, and will be important in some way to the final result. Keep this in mind. Always.

Overview

Your job will be to figure out all the relationships appropriately, guide the pieces to their spots. To do this it will be necessary to develop your powers of discernment and perception. You must learn to see things from different focal lengths.

Practical tips

1. Be sure you have adequate lighting. Sufficient table space. Take care to not drop pieces on the floor where they could become lost or dragged off by the cat.

2. Build the boundary first. It will save you loads of time and angst, and possibly regret.

3. Be gentle with the pieces. They will have to be handled many many times by you, and by others who do the puzzle. Don't create unnecessary wear and tear on anything.

4. Always work from easiest to hardest. You'll gain confidence and experience that way.

5. Go ahead and group your pieces by color, by shape, by orientation. This is not equivalent to political or economic discrimination, this is just you sorting things out for yourself privately in your own personal life. You ARE allowed to have a personal opinion on your own life. On your own puzzle pieces. From your own perspective. On absolutely every issue/aspect. In fact it's a requirement if you are to become a thinking person.

6. Keep the boundary between a) your own discernment and b) unfair social discrimination, clear, clean and separate, and refuse to tolerate any unfair institutionalized structured discriminatory practices in outer life. (See "Symbolism," above.)

7. Take your time grouping the pieces, laying them out carefully. You can do this any way you want. It will save you time in the long run. And you've got lots of time. A life time.

Along the way

1. You'll naturally be drawn to some pieces more than other pieces. Don't worry about it. Just remember that you'll need every piece eventually. Consult the 'big picture' frequently.

2. When you get stuck, you'll finally start to widen your visual field, and will notice some little humble piece that you had totally overlooked because it just never stood out for you. This is natural. Don't worry about it. It will be exactly the right piece for that spot where you tried some other piece umpteen times already and it just wouldn't fit.

3. You'll get a nice burst of pleasure out of each tiny victory. Savour the pleasure.

4. When you get frustrated, work on a different part of the puzzle, or else just go do something else for awhile and come back later. Your refreshed retinal receptors will see details they couldn't when your eyes were tired.

5. Invite others to help you if you wish. If you'd rather do it all by yourself, that's OK too. Your choice.

6. You will have a chance to enjoy, sense, experience and integrate all the instinctive emotions that came for free when we were born. You'll experience everything from the slog of repetitive drudgery and continuous frustration to the thrill of the hunt and the sense of triumph. The glue that holds all this together and keeps everything moving along on track is hope. Hope is really all we have for motivational fuel. Nurture hope. One day your puzzle will be complete.

Down a long grey road

Here is a picture of what I've been working on lately.
It took a weekend. One thousand pieces. As I worked I thought about all the ways jigsaw pieces are like people and putting jigsaws together is like life, but then I googled "life is like a jigsaw puzzle" and found that since jillions of others have arrived at similar conclusions, I would refrain from boring anyone with same-old.

Let me just say that the puzzle matched my mood - a long grey road to nowhere except into the future in a grey world which, although it had beauty, was cold. It was a hard puzzle for being
a) monochromatic
b) no straight lines anywhere

I got it done. I got my mood externalized, defined.


I felt more in control after, but still felt pretty monochromatic, bleak, difficult, etc. on the inside. Current blahness stems from the fact that the organizational part of me is very burnt out from the prep for the move, the move itself, and is finally taking a break from life. Also, I recognize how depressed I've been, and have suppressed, for years, thanks to low light levels. (At least that's what I choose to pin blame onto. It's all Vancouver's fault.)

My self-therapy job right now is to stop being concerned about the fact that I can't seem to make much of a plan, or study, or work on my projects, or be social, and just let large chunks of my brain take their time coming back to normal. Meanwhile I occupy myself these days going to the gym, Lu's Train Station. It has the vibe my brain seems to need right now - life is material, so push against it. Very physical. Nothing to distract.
.........

However! .....
Yesterday I cheered up pretty good and I want to share why - someone posted links to Hans Rosling TED talks. I got into them and found myself entranced. This guy, a Swede, a medical doctor, statistician, professor of global health at the university which has a committee which peruses the annual candidates for Nobel prizes in medical physiology, a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, has managed to create the means by which anyone who cares to can look at data collected painstakingly over decades by the UN, on the economic and health of many many countries, and compare them visually. His system is called Gapminder. He designed the visuals to be colorful, fully manipulable bubbles with size comparable to population, which rise to the left when health improves and which rise to the right when economics improve. It's the most lovely way I've ever seen, to look at statistical data.

In a number of TED talks, he explains his system and uses statistics to show how the world has improved in the last couple centuries. His enthusiasm for this adventure and his optimism based on his datasets is completely infectious. I felt oddly buoyed up by all this. It's good that someone out there, so clearly brilliant and beyond kidding anyone, sees the world in this way. It just plain makes me feel better about the planet and about the people on it and about my own being here. It's not like there aren't still lots of problems out there but I can see how breaking them up into little bits gives a better overall picture.

Here are all his TED talks I could find. Each are about 20 minutes.
1. 2006: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen
2. 2007: Hans Rosling's new insights on poverty
3. 2009: Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

If your outlook on life happens to be underwater and you need to breath some life back into yourself, the hour it takes to watch all three is well worth it.

Valuing the inner life

I'm in one of those periods when everything feels like swimming through peanut butter. There is no motivation and no energy to do anything even when there is some motivation. I'm truly in the swamp of myself at the moment.

On the outside things are settled safely - still in visual upheaval, with a dresser half made all over the living room floor, and the red rug I brought from Vancouver (now a rolled-up red albatross also lying on the floor of the living room, because only too late did I realize it really is too large for the room and doesn't suit it anyway). But I don't care right now. I sit on the roll while I build the dresser from a kit. I step over it to open the balcony door. I am careful not to lose screws or screwdriver or hammer in its folds. I don't care how long it lies there because I'm sucked down into the muck at the moment. I'm the engineer, off my own train, having to build more track out front before I can get life moving again. My attention has been sucked down into someplace I can barely apprehend. For now.

I don't care about any of this actually. It feels fine, or perhaps I'm just kidding myself about that.. I don't know. All I know is that I'm in the nadir place again. I've been here before, at least three times in my life. I recognize the territory. I recognize that I'm depressed. I saw this coming and arranged outer life to accommodate it, rather than let it crash me into a ditch. I've acquired a useful illusion of control. I can anticipate my own crashes and prepare appropriate landing places.

Furthermore I know what I have to do. I went out yesterday and found a gym about 6 blocks away, right beside a beautiful indoor swimming pool. I plan to join it. I have absolutely nothing else I have to do with my body, because I'm not working at the moment. I can work with it, as opposed to using it to work. It is now about 35 pounds lighter than it used to be, and I want it to feel stronger; I want it to sustain me better. I want to work with what's left of it. I do want to feel "better." Physically. I don't feel bad, physically. But I also know I can feel "better," physically. Regular exercise is a mood-enhancer. I've used it on and off over the years like other people use drugs. It works for me.

I have never wanted to do exercise in anything more than bouts, a few weeks or months at a time, and only when necessary. I've always been afraid of dependency. Worse, I've seen how exercise addicts tend to ruin their own bodies through excessive dependence on strenuous behaviour to feel "good." They turn exercise into a religion, feeling guilty when they don't do it, instead of using it carefully as a medicine, and only when necessary, to feel "better."

On the way back, I dropped in at the Wheatland Center, for the first time under my own steam. I headed immediately for the jigsaw puzzle room. Instantly my brain wove this room into a self-construct for therapy. My jigsaw therapy room.

I worked for a little while on the puzzle that was out yesterday - a snow scene with deer, lots of deep blue colours. While I puttered finding pieces with bits of antlers on them, I chatted with a few of the seniors there. A woman named Helen works there everyday, is the caterer as well as the main administrator/treasurer. She rents the place out for events, and takes care of organizing the monthly dinners. I agreed to help out with the one at the end of this month, a turkey dinner. I am to arrive at 9 AM and help with potato-peeling, etc., leave for awhile, come back in the afternoon and set out desserts. After she left to go do some banking, I met her husband, whose health has declined. He walked in heavily, and we introduced ourselves to each other. He went to sit by the window, told me about his experience having to let go of one of his favorite past times, bridge. He has acquired a speech difficulty which creates pauses that are too long to be able to feel comfortable holding his own in a bridge game. He's had some surgeries which he didn't tell me about but which his wife had mentioned before he came into the room, and about which I didn't ask for detail. He chatted randomly about himself, how he feels his life closing in around him, how he was going along just fine, then suddenly his health seemed to collapse on him all at once. He said to me, "When you have your health and everything is going along fine, like how you are now, you just don't know what it's like when it's gone." I found exactly the piece that I needed to finish both a blue hill in the distance and a chunk of deer butt, put in in its spot in the jigsaw. "Well.. I guess sooner or later we all get to find out what that feels like." I replied cautiously. He seemed satisfied with that.

I started doing jigsaw puzzles a few years ago because I find them soothing, relaxing, refreshing on some deep brain level or other. They help me disperse inner fog. They help me re-establish, at least temporarily, some illusory sense of control, or order. Moving here to Weyburn and being able to access this jigsaw puzzle room freely will be perfect. There is no system (I don't know where I got that idea from - maybe my brain just made that up). You can borrow as many puzzles as you want, take them home, do them, bring them back. No one asks you to sign them in or out. Marvelous. All social interaction here, with the seniors, is a sea of personal and interpersonal trust. I love that.

I've changed my whole outside context, quit work, moved home, moved away from the outer fog - now I can start tackling this inner fog. Jigsaws will help me kill time while my brain gets itself back up on the track.

I plan to pick up this book, the Red Book, by Carl Jung, as soon as it makes it onto the shelves. Here is an article about it in NYT. The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, by Sara Corbett. Caution - it's a really long article.

I am going to read about Jung's adventures while inside his nadirs. Maybe it will be full of useful travel tips.

Silvery bright skies

New pictures.

The large clouds topped with light look like big soft boats, viewed from below, sailing along in some sort of sky flotilla. Living on the prairie is quite a lot like living on the floor of a sea of air in continuous motion.









Even on a cloudy steel-grey day, the sky is bright and silvery, with movement and form and edges and brightness.














I really appreciate how even when the sky is cloudy here, it's still exciting, different all the time, never in the same mood twice. And no matter what the day has been, the sunset is always beautiful.

Whole new take

So, here it is, Labour Day 2009, and I live in Weyburn, Sask. instead of Vancouver BC.
I can't get groceries today, as the main food store is closed on a holiday, and on Sundays is open only between noon and 5PM. But I don't care about minor inconveniences, because I feel new stirrings. New old stirrings, rather. Old sensations but with new brain cells.

In Vancouver, it would likely rain or be cloudy. Here, it rained in the night and is cloudy today. So, what is the difference? The difference is, I can feel crispiness in the air, here, that I could never have felt living in soggy water-logged Vancouver. I feel anticipatory autumnal crispiness in my blood, in my brain. It feels good.

I wouldn't feel this good, physically, emotionally, if I were living in Vancouver. There, I would feel a sense of doom, of winter descending, a sapping away of vitality. Here, I feel as though I have energy. Of course, not having to go out to work to support a life that feels like it erodes faster than it can be shored up, is helping - I can't discount the side effects of having the luxury to laze around, relatively guilt-free. Also the expectation pathways are heavily primed with the serious intention that moving has pumped them full of, so one cannot discount placebo response either.

As a response to being here, now, and liking it, and in anticipation of feeling more alive this coming winter instead of more dead, I am taking on learning about the consciousness system of the brain. I will post about this here and in the Neurotonics blog as time goes by. So far I've closely studied Chapter 10 from Mayo Clinic Medical Neurosciences 5th Ed., one of the best organized texts I've ever had the pleasure of learning from. I made extensive notes and will be layering in information from other books and texts.

I will luxuriously wallow in the information, enjoy the feel of my brain sponging it all into itself. Then I will try to make sense of it - my sense of it. Then I will try to write about it.

My new writing room

I made my dream come true. I moved, have a new, uncluttered, more zen-like existence. Here is a picture of my little writing room.

























Here is a picture of the view out the window, from where I sit. The light comes in from my left. There's nothing beautiful or captivating about the view. It's a humble view, a humble house below, an alley.. but the big green tree is nice, and I especially love that I can see over it!