Thank You for Not Being Insane

I live in a town whose roads all feed it’s people into the city; here you just have to drive to survive. So I catch a lot of antics while on the road that defy reasonable driving sense. My wife and I agree at times, the offending drivers are quite insane. I fondly recall the comedian George Carlin’s comments on people who drive too slow are ‘idiots’ and people who raced by were ‘maniacs. And it’s no stretch of the imagination to group maniacs, lunatics and insanity into behavior radically different than what is deemed normal. 

As a psychology student I learned clarity of terminology. Inevitably the process led to the word insane. It was made pointedly clear that insanity was a legal term, not a clinical one. Insanity by law’s definition is focused on violations of societal norms that included concerns over a person becoming a danger to themselves or others. In English the world ‘sane’ derives from the Latin adjective sanus meaning ‘healthy’. The phrase “mens sana in corpora sano” would be roughly, as a healthy mind in a healthy body. From this perspective, insanity would be considered poor health of the mind, not necessarily a physical flaw of the brain-organ. It refers to the defective function of mental processes such as reasoning. In this fashion psychology would refer to insanity as maladaptive behavior that is unhealthy. 

Enough of the clinical maturations, the point remains fairly clear to me that often we wish to be around others whose behavior and hopefully concept of the world pretty much agrees with our own. Oddly enough, we don’t venture to make those comparisons so much when selecting our intimate life partners. Oh no, only after the honeymoon do the really-sexy-difference in perspective begin to be made known. Sure, there is a tendency for most people to believe they’re pretty flexible about their values and their opinions on how the world ticks. That of course is put to the test when living day in and out with another human being who was raised with an entirely different value system than your own. Sure enough it shows in the little things first: where do you squeeze the toothpaste tube; (middle or end) can be seen as insignificant; at first. But, as time marches on it becomes clear that the other person has rituals and routines that just go against anything you ever considered as reasonable. And hey, let’s be honest, most of us don’t want to believe we’re so rigid that we can’t welcome or even accept something different in the way to get daily chores accomplished…right? 

It is here I am invited to reveal and perhaps even discuss the contradictions in the way my lovely bride and I do life. Yet, I have lived nearly sixty years on this planet developing, and honing, my survival skills; so I have learned this much: To find fault in any of my wife’s ways ~ in writing, and on a public forum, would be the surest sign of insanity for a man to display. 

So then; I am grateful for the differences that help me adapt to change. As for my wife, let me say: Thank you for not being Insane.