Call Me Crazy....

"You're only given one little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it."-Robin Williams

I went to yoga this morning and while we were all in shavasana, the teacher left us with the quote above.  It bothered me because of the way he died, but rather than think about how he must've lost something, I thought about the wisdom that was in what he said. Then I realized that I talk about this all the time....I have a tiny obsession with madness and if you have followed my blog at all, you probably already know that, hence, my obsession with Alice in Wonderland.  Alice says the best people are mad, Nietzsche says there's always madness in love, and Aristotle says that no great mind ever existed without some madness. By madness, I mean the ability to experience extreme ecstasy, enthusiasm, and passion in a frenzy-like way. Perhaps I am obsessed with this idea because the best things I've ever done were the "craziest". 

We live in such an chaotic world, but madness is what keeps us sane. The world is a mess because we're all trying to find one way to exist together, one way of doing things, one way of behaving, one way of believing....but see, that is exactly what doesn't work because as soon as you try to force everyone to be the same,  the spirit dies.  Madness to me is whatever it is about us that makes us unique; it's what makes us react passionately and it's the way God made us at our core.  Like Williams said, it's a spark.  It exists with no explanation, it's what makes us human and childlike and curious and it's what keeps us from becoming cogs on a machine.  Madness is fierce, it never gives up.  It serves a purpose, while sometimes making no sense to others.  It's what speaks to us and drives us to always reach for more for ourselves.  Madness is the fire that burns within us, and when you lose that, you become a lifeless drone.  You become indifferent, which is the worst way to be.  How do you lose it?  People put you down.  They tell you you can't do it.  They tell you you're fat, worthless, stupid, crazy...they tell you that you are safer being someone else.  Before you know it, that little spark is gone. If you want to be mad, find out who you are and what you want.  Then chase it.  Be comfortable being thought of as foolish, because the mad ones usually are....but like Alice says, they're the best ones.

One of the most disturbing books I ever read/movies I have ever seen was "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" by Ken Kesey.  I was nauseated and upset after seeing it more than anything else I had ever seen.  If you haven't read the book or watched the movie, Jack Nicholson plays McMurphy, an eccentric patient in an insane asylum in the 1960's.  He was considered a "criminal" because he got into some fights and drank, but he wasn't insane, much like many of the mental patients placed in hospitals in the 60's.  McMurphy didn't like to conform and he was full of life and spirit.  Nowadays he would probably be diagnosed as having ADHD, but anyway, the grouchy, controlling, negative head nurse despised him and eventually had him undergo a lobotomy, which scrapes away the prefrontal cortex in the brain.  This part of the brain is responsible for personality expression, moderating social behavior, decision making, and following rules and norms.  So McMurphy wanders in, in a vegetable-like state, and your heart sinks.  At the end of the movie, one of the patients smothers him to death because he can't stand to see him without life, without the madness that he loved so much.  I know it's probably crazy to some people that I used this movie as an example because I am basically saying that I view conforming the same way as I view having a lobotomy, but that's the way I see it and that's the way that Kesey saw it.

There is joy in madness and a joyful life is what we are meant to live.  It saddens me that Robin Williams said something so wise and yet still found himself at a place where he was lost.... there's really nothing more I can say about that.  I do believe that we were meant to live for so much more than the world tells us to live for, and we may look mad if we wander....So what.