Monday morning out early 6.30am with Sam (our black Labrador he’s a rescue) I am sitting under an oak tree in the middle of a field of deep grass looking out towards Welsh Marches over more lush green fields and greener trees and one 20 acre field of barley studded with poppies. Very wet feet after heavy overnight rain, trainers my son bought me in Baltimore eight years ago still going strong if a bit disreputable, but very comfortable when dry. I had never worn trainers until he insisted on buying me these, they were outrageously expensive.
Hate Monday mornings always a reality check, and having to get my head into a business mode. I was musing on what I’d really like to be doing and right now I would like to be somewhere where I could turn off all media television, radio internet for a month. How good would that be? (Descartes said, ‘He who lives hidden lives well.’ ) Well I would like to live well hidden and you know nothing would change. Turn it all back on and the same sad rubbish would come out, politicians gibbering on about the economy, oil spillages and ecological disaster another sixty people blown to smithereens by a murderous car bomb, another poor boy killed in Afghanistan and the sudden rush of sadness thinking of the sixty, or the one parent somewhere receiving the news.
How jolly to know that according to the World Health Organisation, depression will become the second leading cause of worldwide disability by 2020, second only to heart disease. Yet research has shown that doctors have been regularly labelling people as depressed when they are simply sad, and that sadness is good for you. Researchers have also undertaken studies to ask happy and sad volunteers to judge the truth of a range of urban myths and rumours, and found that sad people tended to be more sceptical. This is because negative moods lessen the likelihood that a person will rely on simple stereotypes when responding negatively to minority groups and that when you’re sad, you pay more attention to new information in the outside world
Sleeplessness, lack of concentration and changed appetite are all side affects of normal sadness but the way that doctors interpret these criteria of sadness is to describe them as depression, which they then treat yet more antidepressant drugs. How sad is that?
Things that make me sad right now are the physical distances between my children and me and how little I get to see them. Success and fame have their downside and the far side of America is a long way away.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov
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