I believe this is the first letter I wrote to Cassi. Not dead sure, and I know I wrote some emails before this still this could be the first paper letter.
Saturday, 18th September 2010
Dear Cassi,
Paper letters are a real toss back, but the situation dictates them I guess. Though I have to say I think there is a greater level of, I don't know, thought in them. If nothing else, it proves that the writer cares enough to get off their rear and to the mail box, and that is more than many of the people in my life can do. I think there is something to be said for holding a piece of paper that was held by a friend a great distance away, and a letter, fragile in its physical manifestation, is more enduring to the heart.
I don't think I'm making my point well. As you know, words fail me. The English language for being our best mode of communication is a whisper at best for what we wish to say. I'm told that nearly a third of the message meant in the spoken word is lost in written form. What a small figure that is given how much of the message is lost from mind to mouth. In such a way we are made the prisoner of our sad human forms, locked up in ourselves, and forced to be alone. I can't imagine that makes a lot of sense to you, I think I'm just talking to myself. Well, let me move to another point.
It was a few weeks ago that I resolved to put away the past and, as you may have imagined, it was no easy task. The first thing I had to do was deal with my anger and anxiety, and that is a work I think is close to both of us. One would think that after all the searching of humanity dealing with these issues would be common place both in the doctor’s office and in the classroom. The doctors of our country are treaters not healers and the teacher’s talkers who dirty the word teacher by their use of it.
The eave of my resolution was a hot evening in the California summer and made hotter by the disrepair of that tomb I live in so that the air was oppressive. I was thinking of some injustice I have suffered, what it was is lost to me in the sea of those things, and my body was like a furnace of rage in its own right. My hand jerked as if to lash out at the thing that bothered me, and my heart pounded to make my body ready for the fight. I clenched my jaw and heard my teeth crack under the strain.
Then I stopped, I just let myself fall to the floor and sat still for a few minutes. I knew that getting like that would never help things. It was just making them worse. The anger that lived in me had become an interloper invading my life, a malicious invader stealing from me the ticking moments.
I knew better than to let this happen to me. Stress and anger weren't topics covered in my psychology classes, but the treatment of addiction and obsession were, and those feeble tools were all I had to lance the sore of my pain and let the puss run from this wound that is my life. It starts with the heart. The hammering of the heart puts the body into play and the body then drives the mind. With every remembrance the anger I felt grew like a tumor expanding, and forever hungry for more of me. Now when I become angry I breathe deep to slow the beating of my heart. It helps, you wouldn't think a thing as simple as that would, but it does. With that simple thing I could stop the reactions that made me so upset. I couldn't stop the anger but I had some amount of control.
Then came what I had learned from the research of B. F. Skinner and his systematic desensitization theory. It's good to stay calm, but to deal with the anger it is necessary to change how the body reacts during the remembrance. I had to think of the thing that made me angry and keep breathing deep staying calm and collected. It sounds counter to logic to think of the thing that bothers you and try to stay calm. Yet, I do find it helpful. If it becomes impossible to think of the thing that bothers you without getting angry then think of something related to that thing.
One of the things I had to do was think of my father, not what he did that angered me so but just of his face. I can't tell you how much I would like to have put a fist into that face, but I had to think of him and stay calm. After some time I could remember many of the things he did without growing angry. Well, that's one, now for many many more.
Best,
Richard Leland Neal
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