Schizoaffective

 "To me, freedom is choosing to respond attuned to fate, so the moment can blossom in its full richness, reaching with fate's power into the past and future, and throughout all space." I ended last week's blog post with this sentence. This week, I am going to explain it fully. We'll begin with the notion of "freedom." I was arguing that true freedom has less to do with ego-based choices than is often claimed. Instead, freedom is responding to all that is around me in a given moment in an attuned manner. What are free people attuned to? Paradoxically, they are attuned to fate. I am using the word "fate" in a manner that does allow for some choice. By "fate," I am thinking of all that impinges on a moment: history, current events, biology, biography, climate, and so on. Most all of this is well outside our conscious control, and even outside of our knowledge purview. There is no way to grasp all that goes into the possibility of a momen...

by Jay Paul   What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity. Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring...