Vague, confusing title. Or perhaps intriguing and poetic? Maybe both? Neither? Did you know that 1 in 10 people in the US is taking some form of psychiatric medication? Did you know that the US is one of only 2 countries in the world that allows direct to consumer drug advertising? When the Reagan administration was moving to pass legislation to first allow this advertising, the heads of many pharmaceutical companies actually opposed it. Pharma heads were indeed a different breed at that time. Slowly, slowly, one small decision at a time, one justification at a time, a whole culture shifts and a whole industry, …..well, darkens.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman. I take this quote from Ryan Holiday’s new book Ego is the Enemy . 
I will be reading snippets from this book, to myself, for a long time to come . A self-help book that actually helps! A how-to-live book for all ages. An amazing book, more so for the fact it is written by someone merely 29 years old. A book that weaves in the teachings of the classic philosophers and references modern day leaders and public figures.
That is my good news. Earlier this year I got lost down a rabbit hole while dealing with a family member who was/is in the grips of a mental health challenge. What I learned about how we understand and deal with mental health, and the shortcomings of our system, I wish I could unlearn. I wish it weren’t true. I spent a long time in Despair. Disbelief. Anger. Denial. It sounds like a classic grieving process, and it was. Grieving my naiveté. There is so much wrong with how we diagnose, treat, and manage mental illness.
Here are some excellent reads if you wish to look further into the situation for yourself: The emperor’s new drugs: exploding the antidepressant myth, by Irving Kirsch.
This last one, A mind of your own, shines a bright light into the scary space of psychiatry and mental illness, and it comes from an MIT and Cornell educated psychiatrist who knows the system inside out.
But what is Wabi Sabi? Wabi Sabi is a Japanese concept that we as Westerners apparently find very difficult to understand. It has to do with an aesthetic of beauty that includes, among other things, asymmetry, imperfection, modesty and simplicity. This storybook, about a cat named Wabi Sabi, who sets out to understand the meaning of her name, will do the concept better justice than I, who only this morning heard about it for the first time: Wabi Sabi, by Mark Reibstein. 
As for moving targets, well, moving targets, as in: you set off aspiring to something, but once you finally get it, you realize it wasn’t exactly what you thought, and not exactly what you wanted in the first place. So you set off again, always seeking, always curious. The key is that you do set off again. Dusting yourself off, as they say. Again and again and again. If you’ve been around long enough you realize this is a constantly repeating theme in everybody’s life. And that is another meandering blog post, for another rainy day…..