Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colorectal theology, offering hope to no one.

But political polarization is by no means the only growing pain exacerbated by anxieties about the future in urban, industrialized economies, where for many the boundaries between our professional and personal lives have all but disappeared.

Perhaps we complicate things for ourselves by trying to see things in linear terms when a rather more messy complex of interacting factors might be a more valid interpretation.

It is a curious paradox that schizophrenia might be imagined as a condition of being both less or too much of whomever we might be. An intricate balance is lost.

Kurt Goldstein, studying brain-damaged soldiers during World War I, was moved from his original, deficit-based point of view to a more holistic, organismal one. There were never, he believed, just deficits or releases; there were always reorganizations, and these he saw as strategies (albeit unconscious and almost automatic) by which the brain-damaged organism sought to survive, although perhaps in a more rigid and impoverished way.