I don't want to, but a reflection on Robin Williams seems in order.  Several video clips, on Velonews as the cycling community mourns one of its own, leave me with the sense of an excess of voices, too many words, a manic skipping about.  Yes, a comic ability, a gift of improv.  The audio interview with him and the actor guy who records the conversation in a garage replayed on MSNBC Lawrence O'Donnell catches Williams talking about all the thoughts that go through the mind, and the dark one that comes up, 'put that over there in the WTF category,' talk a very rapid and shifting pace seemed to near the ballpark of schizophrenic behavior, behavior found often enough in the brain chemistry of Type O blood, an excess of dopamine, part of a manic cycle swinging between adrenaline production and dopamine, perhaps in some way the legacy of being up for hunting game to survive.  Williams hairy enough.

And what does this say about the rest of us who seem to like words?  What are our excesses about?  Talent, or malady?  An attempt to calmly ride the chemical swings of the brain?  Type O people have a harder time getting the adrenaline and nor-adrenaline cleaned out of the system.  Maybe that's what journals are about, taking events bit by bit, getting them down in some way as if to deal with them in a satisfying way, as if to be able to file them away.  Naturally, we're drawn in these efforts to the things that confuse us, and in a way we're wired to go over them and go over them, even ad nauseam.




A good friend suggests to the writer a valuable piece of advice, worth quoting.

But I was thinking if you could let some of your younger self be ... just be. Let it be just as it is. Ask yourself ... "do I really have to figure it out"?

Then allow your present self to forgive your younger self ... and/or the other way around.

" I forgive myself for the hurt I caused you. May you forgive me too. May the sun shine for you, may you be surrounded by love, may your inner light guide your path."

This took me a little while to ponder, and the first literal attempts at it met with refusal, the subject still feeling the hassle of Restaurant Week, professional confusion, tired, the usual litany along with ragweed pollen.  A long nap, a walk around the block, and a more meditative mode has arisen.  And reinforcement arrives from the Buddhist thought that it is ultimately necessary to focus not on existence but on the experience of impersonal experience.  (Again, I find the meditation explanations  at http://www.buddhistvihara.com helpful in this regard, as I work toward a better understanding.)

And so the goal becomes not to record the event through endless takes, reruns, different voices, remembering an experience, relating it, getting caught up in the exercise of wording it all out, but in the calm of realizing that one is experiencing experience itself through the clear light of the impersonal conscious mind, which means shifting away from that sense of life as existence of everything as subject and object, seen in terms of a solid fixed self.

That one would go through a whole account of an earlier life then seems maybe like a bit of the verbally exhibiting illness of the mind, not the proper perspective from a final point of view.