July 3, 1997

he "inner dialogue" is a powerful thing. You know what I'm talking about. It's the voice in your head, your mental traffic. I'm reminded about this today when I heard the story of my girlfriend's daughter. She had a basketball game last weekend. It was the first time she had played with this group of girls and for these coaches. Her position in grade school was always point guard. The pill belonged to her to dispense. JaNene didn't get to handle the ball and felt that she was getting iced by the other players. She felt down after the game, for the next day, and the next week.
    Can you imagine the mental traffic for that poor child? Having had some experience in the world of the blues, I can almost tell you the things that that girl's mind was saying. Questions predominate. Why can't I? Why don't they? Won't I ever? The mental traffic feeds on itself, and builds to a crescendo. The more you think about it, the more you feel bad. The more you feel bad, the more you think about it. If there is a key to mental health, in my opinion, it is learning the skills to tame this voice. The skill to be learned is that of changing the channel when you notice the voice is going off.
    The inner dialogue can also be a pleasant and familiar thing. Over the past couple of years I have been reading voraciously (for me). The subject material of the books have been varied but have tended to follow certain broad themes. Some of the themes are religion and theology; science, especially evolution and cosmology; eastern mysticism; history, including biographies of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Meriweather Lewis; the history and character of my home area of the Midwest. When I think about these books and the lessons they teach, I have a rich inner dialogue which gives me endless pleasure.
    Pleasure and escape. And the search for meaning. Maybe it's ironic that it is my inner dialogue that rescues me from my inner dialogue. But the fact is, there will always be an inner dialogue. It just so happens that every person has the power to control that conversation. But having the power and having the skill are two different things In times of pressure it is very easy to fall into a self destructive dialogue if that is the habit learned in life. But if that skill of channel changing is developed, the whole world looks much brighter.
    The channels I prefer to stay tuned to are the history channel, the discovery channel, the ultimate meaning channel, and the human relationship channel. Now I went to college, but my true learning has been in real life. That includes the so called lessons of life, but also the book learnings. In college I was searching for ultimate answers and got a mumbo jumbo of facts. Since then I have studied facts from many sources, and have begun to piece together some meaning.
    This is the first of what I hope to be a series of essays. It will be a way of putting on paper, the ramblings of my mind. I hope it will allow me to be more systematic in my thinking. I hope that it stimulates me to follow new lines of inquiry. And who knows, maybe one of my grandchildren will read them someday and pick up a piece or two of information to pass on to their grandchildren. (After all isn't that one view of what life is all about -- the passage of information to descendants through either genetic or cultural evolutionary means? (This will clearly be one of the themes in some future essay.)