One of those remembered moments occurred to me this morning. It was just as I was wakened by Beignet, the orange and white Ragamuffin, when he decided to lie on my face and all that fur clogging the respiratory system brought immediately to mind… well, on second thought, let's not dwell on it. Too morbid. The point is not the memory itself but the effect it had on the limbic system.
This summer has been one for the record books in its own way. The Genome is a sensitive fellow and, what with one thing and another, he's been filled to overflowing with the cortisols that cause depression. When I say overflowing, I mean that the stuff has been sloshing up against the tonsils like the incoming tide. I just don't have room for any more. Full up!
When the hippocampus retrieved the memory and displayed it on the big screen--I'm not so sure it wasn't in 3D--I leapt out of bed, crossed the room to stand in front of the window in what was for me the work of an instant. I was expecting the restorative of summer morning sunshine of course. No good. It's September 11--a cause for more dark memories but not the ones that were suffocating me at the moment. We are mid-month into an early autumn, the season of mists and fruitful mellowness, as Ms. Wonder puts it. The sunshine wouldn't reach the high hills behind Chadsford Hall for another 30 minutes.
What one needs in times like these, I don't need to tell you, is a higher power and I looked around for Ms. Wonder but the room, though well-equiped with the usual furnishings--one bed, two dressers, about a dozen cats, was noticeably absent of Wonders--Poopsie or otherwise.
What now? is what I asked myself.
Run faster! came the reply and it was delivered in a panicked tone of voice, if I can call it a voice. The words were made without benefit of sound waves because it came from the almond-shaped little cluster of brain cells that you may know as the amygdala but I call Princess Amy. "You've got to get away from those memories!" she said.
"Peace, Princess," I said, "be still. There's nothing to be afraid of. I can handle this."
"You?" she said. "You can't deal with something as simple as cat fur. What do you think you're going to do about it?"
It was a good question and I had to admit that she had a talking point about the cat fur. I didn't have a ready answer so I asked her to excuse me while I paced the hallway in thought. It wasn't pleasant in the hallway. Confining for one thing. For another, each time I got a good stride going, I came to the end of the hall and had to turn round and do it all over. Then, as so often happens, an unaffiliated thought led to a serendipitous one and everything changed for the better. Here in a nutshell is what happened.
First, it occurred to me that the office window faces the east and if there is to be sunshine, that's the first place to look for it. I removed myself to the office. Once there, I was surrounded by mountains of thoughts affiliated with my book, Out of the Blue. I'm sure you know what happened next. With that book in mind, all the power principles that make up fierce living presented themselves to me like the fruit in Ms. Wonder's early autumn. There you are then--power principles to keep the blues away. I immediately choose one and put it into action.
"Ha, ha, ha," I said.
"What's wrong with you?" said the princess.
"Hee, hee, hee," I repled.
"Have you dropped of the deep end?" she said.
"Ho, ho, ho," I said and was reminded of good ole St. Nick and all those delightful lies we were told as children. Then I began to laugh in earnest.
"You sound like one of those mad scientists that live in the dungeons of upstate New York castles," said the amygdala. "You should get to a doctor."
By now I felt great. I began to toss about cat toys and laughed just because I felt like it. Beignet and Sagi were doing figure eights at my shins. Abbie was looking at me in saucer-eyed amazement. Uma was racing back and forth from one room to another and Eddy was marching around as though he were in charge of it all.
Now I've come to the reason for this story. You may consider it a warning. If you are enjoying a good bout of deep blue depression and you want to keep it going for a while longer--you may be in a particularly creative mood or perhaps you're preparing for an interview on local radio--for goodness sake don't start laughing. Laughing, even if you don't feel like laughing, will lift you right out of the depths whether you want to be rescued or not.