Benefit of the Doubt

Although I do not consider myself "retired," since I'm still doing essentially what I've been doing since I was 13, that is writing for public consumption, it has been just about exactly a year since I stopped going into an office as a writer on someone else's payroll. People ask what's it like, and I answer that it's been a very reflective time...which is a bit redundant with my pre-retirement life because even when I was working for a salary I never felt squeezed for reflective time...but NOW! I feel like a Tibetan monk sometimes, I'm so deep into my own meditations. It's a wonder I'm not bored to death with my thoughts given how much time I spend with them. It puts me in mind (no pun intended) of my favorite Springsteen line: ...but it's a sad man, my friend, who's livin' in his own skin/and can't stand the company.
Thankfully that's not me...for now anyway. Retirement would be impossible otherwise…nay, life would be impossible. I'm back to walking the hills most every day now that my torn Achilles has recovered, and the walks are time for acute reflection as I'm not as much a student of the flora and fauna as I would like to be...or should be. I simply try to get up and at 'em between the time the coyotes tuck in for the day after their all night carousing and when the rattlers slither off to the office for a day of filling hikers with high anxiety while low baking in the sun. On one most recent walk, I found myself, quite by accident, indulging in an act of reflection I'd never engaged in before as I recounted the many outstanding bad encounters I'd ever had in my life. In each recollection I gave the person on the other side of our dispute the benefit of the doubt. In other words, it was an exercise in seeing what life would feel like if I was always wrong and everyone else was always right. It's a real boundary-busting experience where the boundary is I and thou, but I'm here to tell you that it didn't feel all that good.
Physically it actually weighted down my steps, raised my heartbeat, and significantly increased my sweat sop. Emotionally it made the great outdoors scarily claustrophobic the deeper I got into it, even though I had miles of mountain and desert to my back and an endless stretch of the Pacific out in front of me. So I wouldn't recommend it to anybody without this warning. And I can't promise...or even claim...that it's one of those gain from pain experiences. I didn't come out of it like John Cusack's character in the terrific film High Fidelity with a mission to go hunt down everyone I ever wronged to apologize. All I can really say is that for one morning of my life I gave everyone I ever had an issue with the benefit of the doubt. 
This experience of mine transpired two days before Robin Williams committed suicide, and his death caused me to consider how lucky I was to drift into such a state of mind willingly...and then to emerge from it free and clear at the end of my walk. I felt fortunate not to be a prisoner of my mind…trapped in my own skin. Yet my man Norman O. Brown suggests there's an excruciating paradox at play here...that those who are unable to erect false boundaries between themselves and the world at large may be living closer to the truth of our existence than those of us safely hiding behind the gates of reality. Writes Nobby:

It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split minded...Schizophreniacs are suffering from the truth…The schizophrenic world is one of mystical participation, an "indescribable extension of inner self"; "uncanny feelings of reference"; occult psychosomatic influences and powers; currents of electricity…Definitions are boundaries; schizophrenics pass beyond the reality-principle into a world of symbolic connections: "all things lost their definite boundaries, became iridescent with many-colored significances"….The mad truth: the boundary between sanity and insanity is a false one.

In the wake of Robin Williams's death there has been a great deal of discussion about depression. It seems to me--though I'm no shrink--that depression was merely the epilog. Schizophrenia was the prolog…for both better and worse. What happened in between was the iridescent, many-colored significances he gifted us with.