Q is for Quest, Quality and Questioning norms !

Day SEVENTEEN: April A-Z Blogging Challenge 2015  : Mental Health Awareness — layers and nuances

Also including this post in the WordPress writing challenge ignoring the prompt but going along with today’s twist: pay attention to your sentence lengths and use short, medium, and long sentences 

Writing 101: Day ELEVEN: Length Matters (in sentences)

  

Quest, Quality and Questioning norms:

In the busy world that we inhabit, the word ‘quest‘ has a quaint sound to it. It throws up images of knights on horses and maidens waiting in castles to be rescued from ferocious dragons by the said knights ! We do not have time for all this romantic stuff that was better suited for a more relaxed world. And yet, knights, dragons and damsels in distress are who we face everyday in life. Come again, you might say. Yes, even in this world of crazy routines and endless tasks, damsels in distress and dragons breathing fire do exist. Times have changed and it is we who need to be rescued from dragons, the mental dragons inhabiting the subconscious, subterraneous terrains of our mind. We are the ‘damsels in distress’ and we are the ‘Knights in shining armour’ too. 

So how does it all fit in ? To be truly healthy, to be physically as well as mentally fit, to live lives of quality and not merely of quantity (by the mindless accumulation of material wealth), the subconscious has to be faced, nurtured and healed. Mental illness in any of its several manifestations, mild or severe, is a ‘wake-up call’ to undertake this healing. It is the deep calling to the deep. Something within desires that the conscious mind undertake this task of healing for the greater good of the person. The knight in shining armour, full of purpose is our will and the damsel in distress is the inner creative being seeking release to fully and authentically express itself. When the two meet, the psyche celebrates at this restoration of health ! No one else can undertake this journey on our behalf. It is a deeply personal, private and intensely spiritual quest that ultimately leads to great inner fulfilment.

What of those who are not mentally ill? Are they not called to this journey? No easy answers, but perhaps the inner journey becomes possible when one yearns for something more meaningful in life. When one tires of this endless rigmarole termed ‘life’ and stops wearing masks and the constant indulgence in frenetic activity, life will respond with an opportunity to go deeper. Interestingly, when you start questioning hitherto accepted norms of society and life, when you are no longer willing to let life go by, things start moving, sometimes in unexpected ways. Sometimes this may very well happen through pain. Perhaps a wound to the psyche sets this off. Ultimately, it is all good.

© Lakshmi S. Menon & VOICE’nVIEWS