Philosophy and Taking Walks

I’ve become a wanderer. I just take walks and aimlessly roam around. Being in Madison, I’m rather lucky in that respect. There are tons of parks and two lakes that are a 10 minute walk between the two. So on one walk I can easily go from the wonderful James Madison park to the Monona Terrace (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), with the capital in between. It’s refreshing to walk nowhere, just around. Sometimes I don’t think at all and just take in the sights, and other times I’m concentrating on an area of my book. I often come away with ideas either way.

These walks only last about 40 minutes. Which, at first, seemed like a long time to just wander around, but it’s not. 40 minutes is just an hour long tv show on Hulu. However, it took a little while for me to really get into these walks, because time passes rather slowly and it feels like I’m doing nothing. But I’ve started to embrace doing nothing for periods of time. Times where I just unplug from responsibilities and any pressing matters. And when taking a walk, it’s surprisingly easy to relax and forget. In my estimation, it’s far better than watching a tv show where I’m surrounded by email and my cell phone always chirping with things that I could do.

In between the mild exercise and the do nothing nature of taking walks, I’ve found myself very refreshed and intellectually ready to do work. Looking back on some historical philosophers, like Kant (who was notorious for his walks) and Hume, I can see why they valued their walks so much. It’s simply refreshing and it has improved my moods as a result.

But that’s just me loving my new found freedom to do things.

As for the philosophy side of my life, my book has taken a huge step forward and an equally large step back. That is, I’m restarting the whole thing. Which means that I’m ditching about 30 pages of material. This is not unusual for me, I almost always start off with an idea and run with it. Then I hit a dead end and I scrap 90% of it and take away from it some of its form or an idea. In reality, I almost always have a really bad idea that I develop and have a lot of surrounding ideas, then I get some sort of crystallization which cements all the surrounding ideas and discards the bad one.

And I think that I finally found it with a new framework and a singular concept. The framework comes from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and the concept is something I’m calling Teleological Meaning. Camus’ essay concerns suicide as a philosophical problem and attempts a rational/arational approach to solving it. It fails substantially in its goal, no one who has dealt with suicidal impulses would stop because of his solution (though it might help invigorate some people). But it got me thinking, almost all the existentialisms fail to properly address suicide and they have to revert to the concepts like absurdity to get around the problem. They also hold onto another concept which I have a suspicion is also a problem, which is the teleological meaning concept.

Teleological meaning is the concept that life is given meaning through some guiding principle and this is what makes life meaningful. Here there are two concepts in play; first is that there is a guiding principle, and then that a meaningful life is determined by it. The first problem that I suspect is that these two concepts can be wedged apart, one can live a meaningful life without a guiding principle. This is a task that is not fully developed so it’s not set in stone that this is possible. I might actually stumble on arguments that say that they cannot be wedged apart. Who knows? The second problem that I’m working on is whether teleological meaning is secure enough to answer Camus’ problem of suicide. I have some rough ideas about how it might help in some circumstances, but will create other problems that it cannot solve. Hence, the solution to this second problem is heavily reliant on the solution to the first.

That’s basically what I’ve come up with on my walks. It’s again in a very rough stage with a bunch of scattered notes that outline some of the ideas and arguments. The goal is not to really dismiss teleological meaning as being a bad thing, it’s more of an attempt to separate a common idea and present an alternative that hopefully takes a new tack on Camus’ problem. In the coming weeks, I hope to bang out some of the chapters for the positive side of the arguments and then I’ll have chapters reviewing other attempts to solve the problem.

Lessons on Lithium

Well, yesterday I did something really really stupid. I was absent minded enough to accidentally take my lithium twice. I had that weird deja vu feeling after I took it for the second time, but I didn’t make much of it. After that, it was a slow and steady decline into drinking massive amounts of water and feeling sick. I didn’t vomit, but I had horrible nausea and my memory was horrendous. I had difficulty remembering things done just a few seconds ago. But I kept to drinking about a pint of water every 10 to 20 minutes which helped clear things up by about 6pm. In retrospect, I should have probably gone to the ER, but I wasn’t really thinking that clearly.

Today I’m sluggish still. It’s like a nasty hangover where I’m hungry but nothing sounds good, there’s a headache, and my body just feels weak. I really don’t feel like doing much at all. Instead, I just want to lay around like a zombie and maybe get some reading done. This is of course compounded by my feeling a little mixed. So my mind has energy but the body is just not willing.

That’s about all I can muster for a post. I thought I should write something, but clearly my brain is just not up to par. But, I’ve learned my lesson; when in doubt, skip the dose.

Intellectual Rest

As I wrote earlier, the trend is up in terms of moods. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m up every day. In fact, the past two days I’ve been down a bit. Having a sleep schedule is really helpful for this. The fact that I cannot wake up before 9am is a good sign that I’m a little down and I need to take some proactive steps in getting going.

But what I have also been doing is some really really deep relaxation. Now that I no longer have a thesis hanging over my head, I feel free. And part of what I aimed to do with my time off, besides work on philosophy, is take it easy. And for the past few days, that’s precisely what I’ve been doing.

It was strange at first, sitting around in my pajamas and only doing a few things like dishes. I read a bit, but then I stumbled across netflix’s great collection of B movies from the 70s and their documentaries. The initial feeling was one of guilt. I wasn’t doing anything productive and I felt bad about it. Being productive is heavily engrained in me, so flipping that switch off was hard. Yet, it was necessary. I was in a creative and emotional trough that wasn’t going to get better by fighting it off. It was especially clear to me when I tried to write anything for this blog. I have a very full trash can of failed attempts at posts.

By day 2, I started to feel more comfortable with relaxing and really enjoyed the schlock that I was watching. It wasn’t intellectual, challenging, or anything. The movies were simply bad in a way that was still very enjoyable for how bad they were. As the days wore on and I started watching documentaries about the British Monarchy and the Civil War, I started to feel mentally rested. I haven’t felt rested in an intellectual sense for years because of school and (I know now) the ups and downs of bipolar disorder.

The years building up to this never left me that rested. I took summer classes or worked 60 hour work weeks because I was definitely manic in one degree or another. Then it turned south into booze fueled partying. Coupled with heavy loads of classes then injuries and a worsening mental state left me without really any true down time to unwind in an intellectual sense. The sense that I mean is not simply taking time off for a week but still working on things. Unwinding intellectually is unplugging the brain and doing only basic tasks. I’ve come to think of it in the same way one would treat my back injury. One doesn’t try to get much of anything done, instead one just lays back and lets it heal. This intellectual rest is the same way. I don’t try to do anything cognitively demanding, I just let my mind unwind without any pressures on it.

The results have been pretty extraordinary. I’m starting to get the exercise bug back and my acuity in understanding philosophical issues is returning rapidly. My memory has improved to the point that the lecture that I attended last night is nearly as fresh in my mind as it was coming out of it. I can see connections and mistakes more readily as well. I have even detected an improvement in my over all mood.

And now that I’m rested, the natural inclination to do things is resurfacing. I want to expand my thesis, where as before I was completely done with it. I want to apply my analysis to different areas of philosophy of science as well as take a new approach on my book. After taking a few walks, I realized that I was going about it in a very pedantic research way where I do not have a strong thesis that I use in analyzing the literature. Things are just clicking into place in a way that they haven’t since freshman year. It’s about time in my estimation.

Trending Up!

Oh boy, it’s coming, my secondary cycle is kicking in and it’s on the rise. I think I’ve written about this before, but I have a primary cycle, which is several days long and can be lengthened by some antipsychotics like abilify, and then I have a secondary cycle on top of all of that. My secondary cycle controls just how low the lows get and how high the highs get. It’s like taking a sine wave and shifting it up and down. Also, if my primary cycle is short, like it is now, then my secondary cycle will be over a month or two, but if it is longer, then the secondary cycle is longer. I don’t know how common this is, and it took a solid 3 months of mood journaling to detect it, but it’s there for me. And in keeping with my normal mood cycle returning, I guess it’s time for my secondary cycle to kick in.

Now, looking back, I see that I was in a low dip among other things and my primary cycle just never got that high. I didn’t get the giddy hypomanic states. I only got a few productive days here and there. But that’s all changing. Last night I could not sit still or stop talking. I had far too much energy for my own good. It’s the highest I’ve been in quite a while. It also fit into the way that I usually start to become hypomanic for days; first I’m up for half a day and then it keeps growing in duration.

I’m keeping an eye out though. Though a hypomania feels like a breath of fresh air, I have to make sure that it doesn’t get out of hand. So I’m keeping with my rhythm and making sure I get 8 hours of sleep and eating properly. I’m also making a very concerted effort to take time to calm down and do chores as needed. If a place gets too messy, I start to go full manic and clean everything. I’ve also had the fortunate chance to kill my caffeine intake by running out of coffee beans and switching to tea. I’m also staying away from bookstores. Bookstores are deadly areas for buying tons of books I don’t need. And once I get that high from buying something, I’ll buy another thing, and another… you wouldn’t believe how many books I’ve bought in a day. Finally, alcohol is going away. I’ve been letting myself get a little more lax with drinking 2 drinks over the course of an entire evening. No more. I have only two Kalamazoo Stouts left and those are getting paced out because if I’m manic, I’ll drink a rugby player under the table (and have done so).

Obviously, I’m doing this so I don’t provoke a mania. I’m on a heap of lithium (1800mg) with a blood level of 1.24 mmol/L, but I’m not going to bet that it’ll work 100% of the time. I need to do my end to and try to keep the triggers to a minimum. It’s going to be hard, I already am salivating over buying books to read, but I’m stopping it this time. Despite this, I still expect to trend upwards and reach several days of hypomania. That’s fine, and welcome. Hopefully, if I can keep it contained to some extent, I can channel this into some creative work and reading. Something that is impossible if I get too loopy.

Not Quite Normal, Never Will Be

That’s the basic message that my psychiatrist imparted when I went to see her on wednesday. Well, that an there is no real normal to be shooting for. I agree with her, there isn’t a normal baseline for human emotional fluctuations. And with that I’ve basically accepted that what I’m going through is about as normal as it’ll get. The normal for me is now fairly well established too.

It’s a new normal that I’m still reconciling. What doesn’t bug me that much at all is that I seem to have persistently fluctuating moods. Right now I’m two days up and two days down (roughly). Though, I also have some delays and minor mixed states involved in there too. It might sound really strange to say this, but having these predictable mood cycles is actually very relaxing to me. I know how I’ll feel on certain days and can plan accordingly. I know when I can take bad/good news appropriately, and when I cannot. I think I might actually be terrified if I didn’t have a regularity to my moods. I think I would also be really bored and hopelessly reacting to everything instead of being able to just ride it all out.

That rhythm is also nice to integrate with my social rhythm therapy. I can identify days when I really need to force myself to take proactive measures to improve my mood, like taking walks and getting out of the house. It’s also helped me lock in a routine fairly easily. Strangely, being bipolar might actually be helping me control my more extreme moods. That and lithium.

But I’ve also been in a little funk since wednesday. I’ve been mildly paranoid ever since my mood cycles started up. At first I didn’t notice it, but then it struck me full force while I was taking a walk on wednesday before going to see my psychologist and psychiatrist. I fought off the paranoid belief with a little mindfulness technique of identification and dismissal, but it dawned on me that I’ve been having a lot of these little thoughts for a week or two. It’s not intense, the zyprexa is doing a good job of keeping these things from blowing out of proportion, but it is not a fun realization. What made it worse is that my psychiatrist didn’t think that it would ever go away.

I didn’t get depressed over it, I was in the upper stages of a mixed mood. Yet, I still held out some hope that I would only have to deal with occasional psychotic manias. It’s another thing to be told that you’ll keep believing false things for the rest of your life and there isn’t really anything that you can do about it. The alternative was, of course, an increase in zyprexa. That option didn’t fly because of the brain fog. I’m willfully choosing to have paranoid thoughts. It’s another choice that I’d rather not make, but I try not to let it upset me or dwell on.

The good news is that immediately after seeing my psychiatrist I had to see my psychologist. He gave me a cognitive behavioral technique that is simple in appearance but a bit more difficult in practice. It’s basically the critical examination of beliefs. Underpinning this concept is that our brains automatically react to lots of outside stimuli and this practice is to challenge that. And when one challenges the belief in question, one asks about what evidence supports it and then what alternatives are out there that also fits the evidence. It works fairly well, and applies to a lot in life. I’m starting to apply it to everything for fun and for practice. What it fails to do is tell me what is a paranoid thought to begin with. Fishing for them is quite a skill.

I’ll just have to keep at the rhythm forming and CBT stuff to keep track of these things. The only thing remaining is for my mind to catch up and get really motivated like it did in the old days. Every day I see improvements, but it is an agonizingly slow process.

A Little Nietzschean Philosophy Goes A Long Way

I’ve been in a trough for the last two days and I’m starting to come out of it. Today I have nothing to do except for laundry, so I took the down time as a good place to start some research for my book. One of the primary interests that I have for this book is understanding Nietzsche and seeing what he says in terms of living life. I’ve read some of his works before and always found him insightful, though difficult to understand. So I’m tackling him again, but this time through some of the works of Walter Kaufmann, a preeminent translator and interpreter of Nietzsche.

And I have to say, in between doing half a dozen loads of laundry and reading about Nietzsche, I’m starting to feel my old self come back. Part of it is just reading again, something I’ve struggled with for a while now. It always feels good to read something new. But it’s also the undercurrent of Nietzsche’s philosophy that I like and didn’t pick up on before reading Kaufmann’s book. Nietzsche approached life with two very distinct requirements. The first being an openness to experience where one really takes the experiences almost in a vacuum and allows them to dictate what is to be believed. The second one is an experimental temperament about life, where it’s not about adhering to a single thought or belief system, instead, one constantly tests beliefs against experiences.

It’s very much in line with what I had already written for my book. Particularly the idea of being open to experience. My take on the matter is that one should approach new experiences and struggles as freely as possible and to not fear the fact that they can radically change your life. I’m not going to divulge too much of my book yet, it’s a cluster of concepts right now and really needs the research to provide the quotations and backdrop to what I’m writing about. But that’s not the real point of why it was invigorating. It wasn’t just that I read philosophy that says some interesting things, it’s that it also confirmed some of what I have been thinking.

The flip side to all of this is that reading some philosophy of life or existentialism was and is very invigorating. Either you agree with what it says and it helps to crystalize your thoughts. Or you completely disagree with it and you have to crystalize your thoughts to find out why it’s off. That’s for me at the very least. But it strikes me as strange that it didn’t hit me sooner. I’ve been down and floundering about after being so depressed, so why didn’t I read philosophy that concerns how one should live? I’m almost angry with myself for not doing this sooner. But the past is the past and I can’t change it for the better, at least now I’m starting to feel alive again.

That’s about all I can ramble on for today. Nothing happened except for reading and laundry, so yay, excitement. Hope you enjoyed what I wrote at least.