Mental Hygiene

I was reminded of a quote yesterday by one of my favorite authors, Robert A. Heinlein.   I had to look it up to remember it in full as it’s long.   It reminds me of the process we all go through in life and is something I try to keep in mind as we deal with the challenges of my daughter’s vision impairment:

Mental hygiene is a process of correcting the correctable and adjusting to the inevitable. You’ve got three options. You can keep going into a spin until your mind builds up a fantasy acceptable to your unconscious…a psychotic adjustment, what you would call ‘crazy’.  Or you can muddle along as you are, unhappy and not much use to yourself or others…and always with the possibility of skidding over the line.   Or you can dig into your own mind, get acquainted with it, find out what it really wants, show it what it can’t have and why, and strike a healthy bargain with it on the basis of what is possible. If you’ve got guts and gumption, you’ll try the last one. It won’t be easy.

The Big Boy Update:  My son’s favorite color is gold.   This is relatively new and correlates in some way to the Power Rangers in a way I have yet to understand.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was looking at the fools gold she and her brother had found at the gem mine on Thursday.    She was holding several pieces in her hand when she suddenly said, “Mommy, look, it glimmers!”