Ritual/Routine

Maybe my character undermines my mental health. I've never been able to save. It has always seemed a poor gamble. Yet now, as an older man, I see the dullards. Those who never exercised the right to think with houses I could never afford. This tactic of sleep walking through life, presumably having a dull mind the idea being to quickly work their way through life, reproduce, then place the responsibility of thought on to the next generation.

It is a similar distain I have always had for those who make sandwiches the night before in the knowledge that their days are so predictable as to be food fatalisic. Now, though it all seems different. As the importance of ritual and routine becomes apparent. Maybe those I thought dull were holding back the most terrifing of minds. Hideous beasts only kept i check by predictive food gambling. 

Should you find yourself suffering from products of the mind, or in desperate need not to descend back in to addiction try routine. Of course, at first it seems unpleasent. Getting up at the same time each day. It may even be oppositional to all you have ever aspired to. For me it was tough. I had always risen free of the clock and taken each day as a fresh project.

But dogs like to do the same thing each day. And those that do have better mental health than those whose owners vary walks and treats. Footballers and other sportsmen where their magic pants, their lucky socks, always eat the same meal, always ring their mum before a game. If you want your mind to know what it is doing then don't put it through undue stress. Prepare it the same way each day.

You could argue that this is OCD behaviour. The OCDer is the dullard of mental illness. The boring disfunctional. Yet we expandobrains can learn from our banal freinds. The logic of routine and mental preperation can become perverted by the extreme indulgence of the technique but this is not to say that it can not be a tool in our box to fix our heads.

You can, of course split artists in to two groups of mental illhealth. My own, the bi polar spend their lives trying to hold on to the escaping balloon of creativity. These artists often shift from medium to medium, idea to fresh idea. The other group is the OCD artists who keep producing basically the same thing again and again. These are easy to spot. Anthony Gormley, Henry Moore; all the ones so predictable they are forever getting public art commissions from dull minded councils that dare not trust the bi polar artists.