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In My Right Mind?

This essay really struck me for some reason. I strongly recommend that everyone read all of it, as it is very deep.
https://americandigest.org/mt-archives/005467.php

ABOVE, THE UNINTENTIONAL "FOUND POETRY" of a local murder in Garner Valley, California. Exceptional enough to be brought to the ever shortening attention span of the nation because the toll was unusually high: David, Father, age 42 -- believed dead by his own hand; Chase, son, age 14; Paige, daughter, age 10; Raine, daughter, age 8; Karen, wife and mother, age 42; Karen's mother, no name or age given in the report.

We learn that a "911 dispatcher didn't hear any voices on the line, but was able to identify the sounds of the telephone hitting the wall and a gunshot." We learn that the father's body was found next to a handgun and a phone. We learn that "this community is in no danger. We are not at this time looking for a suspect." We learn that the town is really quiet and that, "A lot could happen right next door and you wouldn't even know it."

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That's a common but still strange phrase -- "in his right mind." Everyone uses it as shorthand for things people do that are, large or small, somehow far outside what we normally expect them to do. Nobody that I know of takes it to the other side of that common phrase and looks at what a person does when he's "in his wrong mind."

Our right mind doesn't like to think it's got a wrong mind. It doesn't like to think it because it does indeed have one, and it is hardwired. Each of our right minds has a wrong mind and we are, with good reason, very, very frightened of it. So frightened that we don't think of it because to even think of our wrong mind gives it power, and it has far too much of that already. It has so much power that, once the wrong mind starts to control us, it takes, as they say, "a power greater than ourselves to restore us to sanity."

I grow increasingly uncertain about many things in this life, but of that one thing I once became, and today remain, certain of without a scintilla of a doubt. Like most men, I tend to forget about that greater power when mucking about in the detritus of daily life. That really doesn't matter. Sooner or later I am always given a miraculous moment on the small scale of ordinary life that lets me know in no uncertain terms that, for human beings, only "a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity."

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Somehow I'd gotten into my "wrong mind." Somehow, I thought then, I'd gotten back into my "right mind." The thing with the hand not working bothered me quite a bit, but I didn't have any ready explanation for it and, being a man who just loves rational explanations, I put it aside until I could 'study the phenomenon' from some book that certainly had the answer.

I didn't know then that the only sensible and rational answer was that "a power greater than ourselves had restored us to sanity." I think I know that now, even if I forget from time to time.

It is a story of one man who reached "rock bottom". It isn't the story of how he made it back, but it shows an approach to insanity, and what it took to get pulled back from the edge.

Edited: Nighthawk on 3rd Jul, 2006 - 12:16am

Mind Right In

I never considered the thought that in order to have a right mind one had to have a wrong mind. When I talk about children with learning disabilities or mental disabilities, they are always easier to identify than what others would call "normal" children - but, to call them that would be to call the others "abnormal." Hence, neurotypical, in lieu of "normal." It never occured to me one had to have a wrong to go with a right. Thank you for that.