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Heeling the Black Dog
May. 11th, 2021 05:12 pmIn no surprise to anyone who has been reading my public journal over the past several weeks, I have had a serious, looming, visitation of the Black Dog. Certainly this year it has been salivating over me more than any time in my life. As is my style, I engaged in some structured self-reflection and wrote and published the resulting essay, "Meet Old Shuck, My Black Dog". This comes from some helpful visits and conversations from Geoff K and Mimi R, both good friends and true. Geoff showed a solid theoretical grounding on relationship matters, practical solutions, as well as sharing some extraordinary experiences that far exceed my own. At least I have the comfort of knowing that the hesitations and doubts of mia koramikino were never motivated by malice. For her own part, the delightful Mimi provided her ever-consistent advocacy of the bon vivant aesthetic community with its underlying European-pagan threads, which is of course is absolutely in accord. I also especially wish to thank the contributions of Stephanie B-G who, whilst also recognising many of the symptoms of driven dysthymia, expressed the virtues of planning. Of course, I have written about such things myself in the past in relation to stoicism and anxiety. I must remind myself to listen to my own carefully considered words that I wrote for others, for they are often equally appropriate to myself.
The cathartic exercise of writing, the solidarity of other humans, and the motivating structure of ikigai have all helped in bringing the Black Dog to heel (or to heal, if one likes). Like some ancient Daoist psychological alchemy that seeks a natural and adaptive harmony from contradictions, the inner melancholic romantic clashes with the driven outer stoic. Not with one defeating the other, but rather aufhebung, where the contradictions and conflicts are resolved to a new higher unity. Don't get me wrong, Old Shuck is still there, always will be, and still looms very large indeed. But as he growls and threatens, I am breaking him in to be my steed, through the darkest nights but ever onward. After all, there are adaptive advantages to driven dysthymia, and I may as well use them to my advantage in my ongoing quest to become a better version of myself and to make the world a better place. This means, in the most immediate sense, finishing my MHEd chapter, sitting my macroeconomics exam for the GradDip, writing up the PID for the Wild Flying Geese project - and that's just this month. In other words, life is still worth living, and to the fullest, and for the greatest good. All of this, I must mention, is despite the fact a certain co-pilot veered off to attend to their own needs and their own repairs, but of course as they must. This flight, however, can still easily be picked up on the radar, and what a remarkable journey it already is.
Whilst on this extensive ramble on healing and repairs, I've had what I hope to be my last visit to the dentist for a while. Later on the same day, I ventured to get my first shot of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, which is sub-optimal, but our government goes for price not quality, even when lives are at stake. Whilst I've written about this before the situation has become much worse with a recent study suggesting as little as a 10.4% efficacy against the South African variant. Still better than zero, I guess, but there's an increasing clamour among medical researchers to use the more effective Pfizer or Pfizer-Novavax vaccinations. My fear that 2021 is going to worse than 2020, unfortunately, seems to be coming true, and at this stage, I can't say I'm too optimistic about 2022, either.
The cathartic exercise of writing, the solidarity of other humans, and the motivating structure of ikigai have all helped in bringing the Black Dog to heel (or to heal, if one likes). Like some ancient Daoist psychological alchemy that seeks a natural and adaptive harmony from contradictions, the inner melancholic romantic clashes with the driven outer stoic. Not with one defeating the other, but rather aufhebung, where the contradictions and conflicts are resolved to a new higher unity. Don't get me wrong, Old Shuck is still there, always will be, and still looms very large indeed. But as he growls and threatens, I am breaking him in to be my steed, through the darkest nights but ever onward. After all, there are adaptive advantages to driven dysthymia, and I may as well use them to my advantage in my ongoing quest to become a better version of myself and to make the world a better place. This means, in the most immediate sense, finishing my MHEd chapter, sitting my macroeconomics exam for the GradDip, writing up the PID for the Wild Flying Geese project - and that's just this month. In other words, life is still worth living, and to the fullest, and for the greatest good. All of this, I must mention, is despite the fact a certain co-pilot veered off to attend to their own needs and their own repairs, but of course as they must. This flight, however, can still easily be picked up on the radar, and what a remarkable journey it already is.
Whilst on this extensive ramble on healing and repairs, I've had what I hope to be my last visit to the dentist for a while. Later on the same day, I ventured to get my first shot of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, which is sub-optimal, but our government goes for price not quality, even when lives are at stake. Whilst I've written about this before the situation has become much worse with a recent study suggesting as little as a 10.4% efficacy against the South African variant. Still better than zero, I guess, but there's an increasing clamour among medical researchers to use the more effective Pfizer or Pfizer-Novavax vaccinations. My fear that 2021 is going to worse than 2020, unfortunately, seems to be coming true, and at this stage, I can't say I'm too optimistic about 2022, either.
