don's report archive

by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.

Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances. -- Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

What, if anything, interferes with your continued progress toward the heights of wellness, given your best possibilities, within reason? I specify within reason because there are only so many hours in a day, week, or life, so we all have to be realistic. In the name of balance and moderation and all that, it is sometimes helpful to recall that there are many things that must be done or attempted that have little to do with advances toward the apogee of one's welldom. We must choose our health and life enhancing initiatives with care, for there is just so much time available for acting upon good intentions to be our best.

Still, it might be useful when setting wellness goals to summon to conscious awareness an explicit, conscious awareness of the nature of personal obstacles to this objective. You might ask yourself, in the spirit of Joseph Heller's Yossarian, Who is the enemy? Yossarian's timeless answer in "Catch 22" was the enemy is anybody who shoots at you -- and anybody who sends you out to be shot at. So it is with your efforts to be truly well, beyond the pale of normalcy, also known as mediocrity. The enemy or obstacle is anybody, or anything, that puts you in harm's way. And harm takes many forms, not just bullets. Maybe, as Robert F. Allen famously advised, it is the unseen cultures, norms, customs, and rituals you adopted, little by little, over time with no deliberation or study. What is the answer you might wonder? Well, I don't know, it all depends, on lots of things. But, I recall Woody Allen once said, Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer sex raises some pretty good questions.

Twain also gets credit for saying, Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can forgive them, banish them, forget them. The mantra of self-management remains you are responsible. Take a close, conscious look at the cultures, norms, customs, and rituals you were fed and which you digested, little by little, bit by bit, over time during your formative years. Identify those traditions that are obstacles, and set free your own mind from the nonsense, the dogma, the clichés and the platitudes. These are enemies of your capacity for reason leading to excellence. These are the forces that constitute obstacles to your conscious evolution to the best life attainable.

Which leads me to my favorite suggestion for dealing with obstacles to being your best, namely, concerning yourself too much about what others might think. I recommend you deliberately choose to be at least a little bit eccentric. Break the harmless little norms or customs that keep you from pursuing your best self, standing out from the crowd, and being what Steve Martin once called a wild and crazy kind of guy (or gal)! Even a dignified, highly regarded free-thinker like John Stuart Mill advised as much: Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time. "On Liberty," 1859

To balance this bright wit with some dim wit, here is one of the single most muddled, nonsensical passages I ever encountered, from an holistic eccentric with a big following, namely Deepak Chopra: The truth is, I'm here, but I am also everywhere else; that you're there, but you're also here, because here is there and there is everywhere and, of course, everywhere is nowhere, specifically. (From a Chopra audiotape entitled Escaping The Prison of the Intellect.) My sense from pondering the above statement is that the guru made good his escape.

Deepak's assault on lucidity was put in perspective by Jack Raso, editor of Nutrition Forum (July/August, 1994, page 42) who noted: I, for one, would think twice before asking Chopra for directions.

Well, that's my tip for today. Be a bit eccentric and go against the norms, if it helps you to be your best and overcome at least a few obstacles to a healthy and satisfying lifestyle. Be well.

(Note: This essay will be filed in the archives in the PHYSICAL DOMAIN under the skill area of adaptations and challenges. Additional articles related to this theme may be found there.)

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

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