How mental health is like a yard

Friday 8/30/24

There is so much mental unwellness in the world. Mental health, across the board, has never been in so dire a place as it is now. Most people are mentally unwell. They have more issues than ever before. They are less skilled at coping than ever before. Reasoning. Knowing. More people than at any previous time are mentally at odds with reality.

Mental health is kind of like a yard. If you just leave your yard to itself, weeds will teem. The grass will grow high and start to overtake everything.

Picture that house when you were a kid that no one had lived in for a while. What an eyesore it was. At night it was particularly scary looking as you drove by. The land and nature was merely doing what the land and nature does. If no one is managing the upkeep, then everything becomes overgrown, swallowed up.

Mental health is the same way, and it's this way for everyone. There is no one who can just stay inside, so to speak, and do nothing, and expect to have a trim lawn and an ordered garden and pruned trees. You always have to be seeing to your yard. That's the nature of mental health.

This is an active, ongoing concern, requiring focus, attentiveness, and effort. Do those sound like qualities that are cultivated or encouraged in our society? Or as we lazy, passive to the point of requiring everything to come to us, and to be done for us, because we don't seek out anything?

Mental health is not well-served by a short attention span because of the focus and dedication that mental health requires. You have to put time into your mental health--emotional time. Heavy-lifting, on-the-inside time, which can be different from external, out-in-the-world time.

What's external, out-in-the-world time for your mental health? Stopping at the museum on you way home early in the evening to quietly stroll some galleries with one's thoughts. Getting in that Saturday morning workout. Watching a really good film. Saying, "Okay, that's enough," and pushing back from the desk and getting a coffee and drinking it in a park.

What's heavy-lifting, on-the-inside time? Laying in bed, and, before sleep, thinking hard about what we've done. A choice we made or will be making. Considering what someone who loves us may have said about us. Being honest with ourselves. Admitting when we could do better. Or were wrong. Thinking of how we can make amends. Trying to be less selfish.

We can put our mind through its paces and these paces will keep the mind fit and ready for the bigger challenges.

I'll give you a silly example. In 2005 or so, I drove with my sister from Boston to Chicago. She was in college and it was her Christmas break. There were huge snowstorms across the country, and it was a very eventful drive.

But what wasn't eventful was where we stopped to eat, which we did three times. I remember those three places. I actively remember them. I call them to mind. I see what they look like in my mind. It's just an exercise. But I have lots of exercises like that and the exercises help me stay mentally fit for the big games, if you will.

I'll give you a different one. If I've written a sentence, and I see that a word at the start of it is spelled incorrectly or there was a typo, often I'll erase the whole sentence and write it again rather than just fix the one word. I know all of the words. I'll do this just to stay sharp. Mentally, yes, but even physically with my fingers and how they move across the keyboard.

That heavy-lifting also involves thinking about things we don't want to think about and taking the time to deal with them. We don't need to deal with them in their totality, necessarily, then and there, and heavy-lifting certainly involves a lot of chipping away. We must not let the pick-axe sit too long on the shelf or else we will find that the shears aren't working as they ought to when we could really do with clearing out a big tangle of creepers.

If you just sit there, if you do nothing, if you count on things being okay, and you being okay, "just because," if you're not always doing the active upkeep, your yard will become a total mess and you won't know where to start to get it back to being presentable and under control.

You'll feel overwhelmed. When we feel overwhelmed, a couple things happen. One of them is that we don't know where to even get started. Getting started is crucial to any solution. It is the most important part, because without that part, none of the others can occur.

Something else when we're overwhelmed is that we lack for energy. It's energy that helps us formulate solutions and get going on those solutions. Energy helps us be able to understand that we need a solution in the first place.

It's inevitable that if one doesn't do enough, one will have problems. And if one does nothing, all will be devoured.

Most people now do little or nothing for the upkeep of their mental health. Every house in the development becomes an eyesore within our analogy. The eyesore is the norm, not the exception, so the market adjusts and our standards change. What we think is okay or good changes.

There's no contrast, no better model, because all of the houses are eyesores up and down the block; and the next street over; all through the town; the state, the region, the country, the world. The eyesore becomes just how it is. What are you going to do? Step outside and start fixing the yard, or keep the shades down and go back to bed?

But it's even worse. Because we reward the eyesore, and we say that there's no accountability to be taken. The homeowner is a victim. There is a cult of the eyesore, but the cult has millions of members, if not billions.

An owner of one eyesore compliments the owner of another because they're yards are equally a mess. And vice versa. When someone moves into the development and puts their house in order, there's resentment. The eyesore boat has been rocked. That yard puts the others to what their owners feel as shame.

I was talking the other day about learning to someone. Learning in the pre-internet age. How so many people now would not be able to comprehend how a person would previously learn something. They had to make a determination to do so, and go out and find the information. You had to want that information.

I did not learn more in the pre-internet times than I do now. I've always constantly learned. Whatever it took, I did and have done. I learn through all means and channels. I'll take any opportunity to learn. I seek out learning. If I have to go here to do this, I'll go there and do it. If I need to type this in and read that, so be it. I run stairs, I learn about myself. So I then run more stairs.

But get up and go--as in consciously deciding to pursue and then do so--doesn't exist anymore. And get up and go inwards, really doesn't exist. The internet and its concomitant culture--which is a form of anti-culture--has taken it out of us. We don't tend to things. We don't put forth active effort in anything. Yes, there are exceptions. But it's very much against the grain of what is now our societal nature.

We see Jane run every morning through wind, snow, heat. Good old, Jane. She's like some throwback. But if Jane is not doing a version of that running throughout many parts of the rest of her life, Jane will have issues and mental health problems. But think of how rare active dedication is that we note it to ourselves when we see someone displaying it in a single area, with a single thing, a single task, as with Jane and her running.

The way we are now renders us vulnerable to being overrun and taken over. To being entwined and imprisoned by vines. To be blocked out from the world by the grass that comes up over the windows of our houses.

This is the issue. It's not that people are all of these things that they say they are and that they claim as if they won a shiny new--and false--label in a cultural game of bingo. They are not doing any of the work. And no matter who you are, if you're not doing that work out in the yard, that yard is going to end up doing you.