Check this out! Really good idea. A thesaurus that shows you synonyms connected like a family tree: www.visualthesaurus.com.

Great little page with a list of billions (not really billions) of collective nouns. http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml.

Useful if you ever want to look really clever and know what the right word is. Just don’t tell anyone where you found them, and they will think you are a genius.

Well, hello!

I’d like to start off my new season of posts with some thoughtful ones on a topic I think about quite a lot. It’s mental health!

Now I know that the tone of this blog might get you to think otherwise (after all there is a link at the top of the page that says “blurry dog hat”). But actually I am quite a thoughtful person. Mental health is obviously really important to people’s lives, but quite often we overlook it. If we’re ill, we go to the doctor, take some medication, do something about it, but if we have poor mental health, we often don’t know what to do, or we can even be completely unaware of it.

Maybe that’s because “mental health” is a scary word. Or maybe it’s because we don’t think of it as “mental health”, for the most part. In this modern world of analysing everything and giving it a world, “mental health” is just another name for “happiness”. And most of us are searching for happiness, are we not?

Happiness is one of those concepts like “success” that everyone recognises, but no-one can quite put into words in a way that describes it once and for all. Since people have been thinking about them for so long, and there are still no answers, we can probably conclude that no-one will ever come up with an exhaustive description of what happiness (or success, or forgiveness, or love, or faith, etc) actually is.

I have found that it is helpful to think of these concepts as people that you get to know. It would be impossible to fully capture who I am in a sentence or two. You might describe my appearance, or location, or go over a potted history of my life, but it’s not likely that you will capture all of who I am.

It’s the same with happiness. Don’t waste time trying to figure out what it will take to make you happy, before you get happy. Just get to know happiness like you would a friend. Learn along the way.

So there’s going to be a series of posts about happiness/mental health, and some of the things I’ve learnt that help keep my mental health ticking over nicely. I hope you find them helpful!

I’ve been thinking about that poem by Larkin, the one that starts “they f*ck you up your mum and dad.”

Now, I have to confess, when I originally decided to write this post I was going to criticise Larkin for being a misery guts. This is based on the one poem that I have read by him, Toads. It’s a poem about how crappy going to work is (which I think is crap, going to work is great, if you hate it, then there’s something you can do about it, don’t just sit there and hate your life for goodness sake).

The best line out of that poem, by the way, is this:

  Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets — and yet
  No one actually starves.

He’s talking about quitting work and how “travellers” don’t do any work, but … “No one actually starves.” I like the words, ‘unspeakable’ and ‘skinny as whippets’. But no one actually starves. I guess it’s the rudeness I like. Can’t think of a way to end this messy paragraphy, apart from just saying, “lol”. Thank you, internets, for providing me with a way out.

Anyway, I then read some of his poetry and fell in love with it a little bit. But I do think he’s quite negative and unecessarily depressed. Be depressed, by all means, but don’t be depressed for no good reason. I’m all for being depressed if you can’t do anything about it, after all melancholy almost makes misery fun, but if you can do something about your awful life, then don’t waste any time in the doldrums.

But there.

Back to that poem. It occured to me that, yes, your mum and dad do mess you up — but then what relationship doesn’t? Seriously, that’s just people. We’re all idiots, really, and having good relationships is made up partly of the art of being resistant to getting messed up by other people’s character flaws. I guess.

There you go, Larkin. You’re a great poet, and I love your work, but it makes me sad that you were so sad.

Read Toads, An Arundel Tomb or Faith Healing.

http://www.jackcheng.com/maxing-out-your-triangle

Sounds like one of those awful cheesy motivational speaker things, but it makes a lot of sense.