As someone who was affectionately teased by a friend with the nickname “Wort,” I can really relate to this article. For me it’s just all about thinking, and I’ve always done rather a lot of it.
I have a febrile brain. I call it riding my six wild horses. But it is far more of a joy than a curse. A long-ago reviewer in Time magazine once described Robin Williams as presenting “the spectacle of a brain on constant spin cycle.” That about covers it. I consider him and his even greater predecessor, Jonathon Winters, “my people.” It’s all about the associative links, and how fast they travel. I once tried explaining to someone that everything reminds me of everything else, to which he replied with the obvious, “you must have a very busy mind.” Bingo!
I remember an article that asserted that successful people were characterized by the continual adjustment of goals—up, down, sideways—whatever it took to keep on toward a desirable end point. I’ve found this tactic quite serviceable through the years because it unleashes maximum autonomy under nearly all circumstances, and in the words of a salty old friend, “Autonomy is what mental health is all about, Baby!”
It’s my grateful conviction that your humanizing articles bring a much-needed dimension to sites like this, Ms. Rogers. I am reminded so often lately of Yuri/Omar Sharif’s line to his brother Yevgraf/Alec Guinness in “Dr. Zhivago” that, `The personal life is dead in Russia.’ It seems as though, in the midst of this era of near-nude bodies; a kind of fraudulent, instant intimacy; and an almost total lack of any kind of behavioral restraint, that a frighteningly intolerant coldness toward anything remotely smacking of human foibles, warmth, and uniqueness is disappearing. I think Leonard Cohen had it right with his “Ring the bells that still can ring, there is crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.”
(De Becker’s “Gift of Fear” was a great read. I will order “Only the Paranoid” today!)
