We’re All Crazy, this brilliant book about the power of having the proper mindset by Jerold Skolnik is an eye-opener, and for me, who’s been feeling down lately, it is a great read!
Let’s face it, and let us face it proudly and with a hint of arrogance: the world is insane. We are ruled over by invisible things (i.e., money), killing each other and ourselves just to get a fraction of a fraction.
Everything is crazy.
We judge each other by the color of our skin, our hair, our eyes, and by the line in our birth certificates that says where we were born.
Why?
It’s so arbitrary. People might think it’s objective, but it’s not. It really isn’t. IT’S NOT!
Reality is just madness affecting a more comfortable form.
It’s no wonder why people implode upon themselves and just go, “HEY!” and become like hurricanes.
With the number of people experiencing some form of mental illness and the rate with which it’s going up, might it be safer to say that the ones who are “sane” now are actually the ones who are “insane?”
Why won’t they? When this world is too much, and our senses are too little.
Now that I’m done bleeding my thoughts into my fingers and into the keyboard and into this screen, perhaps I should now clarify what I’m talking about, or at least trying to.
Over the weekend, after a dazed visit to my doctor about a lot of things and a scroll-through of the ole Twitter feed and typical social media wade-ins, I came upon this quaint little eBook. It had a brain on a lounge chair, wearing a pair of sunglasses (Raybans possibly), a sunhat, and a cocktail drink on a table beside it. There was even a pair of nice flip-flops at the bottom. The eBook was called “We’re All Crazy: Get Used to It!” which was written by Jerold Skolnik. That was an intriguing enough title to catch my eye, and with the brain on the cover, I was very interested.
And you know what?
I agree with the brain. We ARE all crazy, and we just have to get used to it. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean the universe has given us carte blanche to do anything and everything we desire? Even if it means crossing several lines of morality and common human decency?
NO! Heck no!
It just means acknowledging that the peculiarities of the world are not bugs or glitches per se of the system we find ourselves in but expected symptoms, features embedded in the very society we have surrounded ourselves with. You may want to change the society we live in, but that’s an article for another day.
Let’s stick to the present for now.
The only way to properly navigate the insanity of the world is through the power of having the proper mindset, as mentioned by Skolnik in his book. What does that mean?
Well, we go back through time and learn of the Stoics. Their philosophy, handily named stoicism, speaks of the inevitably of things and the acceptance that life itself cannot ever be controlled by mere mortals. Yet, they don’t resign themselves to this. In fact, they try to fight against it by trying to master their control of things that they do have power over, i.e., their reactions to actions and events and whatever else.
You see, the Stoics, with adequate justification, discovered that although we couldn’t steer the wheel of the vehicle, we were very much capable of steering the direction of how we feel. If we simply imagine the world as a child trying everything it can do to rile us up, then it becomes easier to deal with things.
Of course, this is not an endorsement of apathy; this is simply the acknowledgment of inevitability and knowing when to fold.
This idea is best encapsulated in the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Wisdom is the key element. We should learn to know that there are things that are beyond our hands and that with the things that we can manage, we should be brave and try to make things better.
Reymond Reviews 