St John's College
Annapolis, MD
December 20th, 2006

The midweek update...

Writing the last update of the semester halfway through the first week of vacation, and my to-do list is already getting a bit short. In fact, it's shaping up into a pretty nice, relaxing few weeks. Still on the list to get done: fix everything that's gone majorly haywire over the first semester (printer! passport!), and look into summer jobs.

This is really intimidating for me. After having the Natural History Museum internship show up pretty much out of the frickin' blue, I'm not sure how to go about finding something else equally cool this year. Perhaps something in the lucrative, exciting world of marine biology, like at an aquarium. I can teach little kids about the amazing process of cnidarian reproduction. And the importance of taxonomy, or of using permanent ink to label your samples.

Aside from this small amount of pie-in-the-sky thinking (not to knock celestial pastries - I mean, look where I am today), I've also been progressing on ... those questions I was asking a few weeks ago! On health and the mind. It's actually pretty cool, two sources showed up that had new perspectives on these subjects, which is almost as good as an answer. Or is equivalent to an answer. Anyhow, when you've spent a year and a half training in asking questions, you tend to be quick in noticing when the ones you've asked before come up again. So, here's what Epictetus and Dorian Paskowitz have to say about the mind and health, respectively.

Epictetus is a Stoic (incidentally of about 2100 years ago in Greece/Italy), meaning he maintains that to remain calm and indifferent to life's ups and downs is the best way to deal with them.

One apparently odd aspect of his writing, in which he talks about the importance of complete responsibility for one's actions, is that he also talks about the human inability to control some events and says that such events must simply be accepted. In this vein, he says that we are completely incapable of controlling the present - which, to my mind, is true but depressing. The present is all that there is, and if we can't control that, what control do we have left? The answer, according to him, is that we control our thoughts, and thus our plans for the future, which do impact the present. Note to self: Actively plan future.

On to Mr. Paskowitz. I'm reading his book, Surfing and Health, and I'm enjoying it, although I feel that he may become repetitive in the next few hundred pages. His central theme is that "Health is more than mere absence of disease"; he goes on to claim that real health actually means "a superior state of being." He sets health as the positive maximum from sickness, not as just "normal". This was pretty exciting for me, because it tied in to the idea of health all of the physical trial and exhilaration I've ever had: experiences of challenge and power from hiking in state parks, training in karate, living on boats in exotic places, and volunteering with LAMI. Some kind of physical, even more than physical, goodness connects the feelings I have with those activities, and I think they're connected to Mr. Paskowitz's definition of health. Looks like this one will develop with research.

Food for thought! It's the delicious, less-filling alternative to holiday fruitcake. I think I'll take a trip to the library and find some extracurricular reading to undertake.

Merry Christmas, everyone!
Roxanne