About Me — Michael L. Fox
I’m a happy oddball. I’m recommending it.
Hi Folks
I’m a 61 year old retired Clinical Psychologist and my great passion in life has been the “conscious and deliberate pursuit of the life worth living”, and that pursuit begins and ends with the understanding of the human mind.
I write about life and how to live well. I write about ‘Happiness’, which means I must write about everything, from the suffering of mental ‘illness’, to the ecstasy of the “spiritual” or “peak” experience, and all things in between.
In recent years my thoughts have been consumed with the collective madness that we call “climate change”. It seems to me that our species as a whole must undergo an impossible transformation in an impossibly small increment of time, and I am not optimistic.
To be clear, I do not write about Clinical Psychology, or Psychiatry, or neuroscience, or anything that remotely mirrors current mainstream thinking. Mainstream thinking has shaped the world that we are now living in and, though we might prefer not to notice, we are in a great deal of trouble.
The things we learn and believe, as children and throughout our lives, shape and disfigure the way we perceive and experience ourselves and the world. To be unaware of this is to live as a cult members with mental problems, seeking meaning and fulfilment in the destruction of a paradise planet.
I was lucky enough to avoid the ‘marriage and kids’ thing, and today I live a generally blissful life in the Irish countryside, with 4 boy cats and their mammy.
I guess if anything defines me these days it is my love of the natural world and it’s creatures. I spend a lot of time watching wildlife in my garden. I say garden, but I should probably call it woodland, because I’ve planted 300 trees in the last 2 decades.
Over that time the place has been a feeding ground for foxes, badgers, hedgehogs and a large bird population. Many of them have been friends.
Like Ruby.
Wee Blue.
And the Badass Family.
I think of the natural world as the real world, and I feel deeply connected to it. It is a miraculous and complex paradise of a multitude of living things, each playing their part in sustaining the life of the whole. It is both my real home and my real family, and I feel that I am a part of it.
It seems clear to me that humankind has been disconnected, adrift, and homesick, for a very long time.
Having said all of that, I’ve always been a bit of a news junkie, I love to read and watch Sci-fi, I spend at least two weeks each year playing ‘Halo’ on my Xbox, I’m a coffee fanatic, and I’ve been a nicotine ‘addict’ for almost 50 years.
Before smoking bans became popular my favourite thing in the world was to sit in cafes, smoking and drinking coffee, watching people, or having deep and meaningful conversations with complete strangers.
I have a number of good friends but I am a really difficult friend to have. I have spent my life thinking about things, and I have considered opinions on virtually everything. Which means I am a know-it-all who frequently slips into a ‘teaching mode’. People hate that.
I have noticed that writing on Medium has changed that a bit. It allows me to ‘let it all out’ so I feel less compelled to share my thoughts with people who don’t really want to hear them.
I am having a wonderful life.
It’s not the sort of thing one can say out loud, but I have never met anyone as happy as myself. At some point every day, most days anyway, I do the ‘Rocky’ thing where I punch the air and declare myself the world champion of living. I love being alive, I want to live for 10,000 years, and even then I know that wouldn't be enough.
Why do I feel this good? Because I discovered how to feel this good 36 years ago. In theory it’s as simple as letting your heart beat or letting your lungs breathe, and it doesn’t cost any money.
I will tell you how it’s done but it’s virtually impossible for the ‘intelligent mind’ of the modern human to hear it. As a general rule adult human beings don’t really ‘compute’ anything that contradicts their own unique certainty about the way life should be lived.
But I’ll tell you my story anyway.
My current life began with an extraordinary personal transformation at the age of 25. My life before that feels like it was lived by someone else.
I was born a Belfast Catholic in 1961, and a brother and a sister came along soon after. I was 8 years old when ‘The Troubles’ broke out and so many of my early memories are about bombs, and fear of bombs. And ‘mystery’ gunmen climbing ladders in the night and shooting people through bedroom windows.
My father died in 1974 and soon after we moved south of the border, to my mother’s home town in Co. Donegal. This was a strange new normal.
It was there that I discovered alcohol at the age of 15. I remember being teased about being so bad at ‘holding your drink’, so I wanted to get good at it. By the age of 19 I was one of the best.
I studied Civil Engineering for almost 3 years. I had a good feel for engineering but I dropped out of college for a number of great imaginary reasons. The real reason was that I was smoking hash every day and I just stopped caring about project deadlines.
By 25 I had moved to Dublin. I was unemployed and unqualified, I was lonely, and I had ‘Depression’, ‘Anxiety’, hopelessness, self-loathing and all of that stuff. I was completely lost and I lived one day at a time without ever thinking of a future.
One night I was in a ‘night club’, drunk and stoned, when I met a guy I vaguely knew. He told me that he had just qualified as a psychologist, and I slobbered and drooled as I told him about my own great interest in the mind. That great interest was all of 2 minutes old, but I walked away imagining that I had held my own in an intelligent conversation.
The following night I was in a friends’ apartment, sitting in the chair I always sat in, looking at the bookcase that I had seen a hundred times before, when I noticed that one of the books had “psychology” in the title. Despite having an abiding distaste for all things ‘learning’ from the day I left school, I borrowed it.
The next night I lay down on my bed and started to read it. Words can’t describe how boring it was, but I had nothing else to do. I had no TV, I had no money to go out, and I had no-one else to visit. So I persevered with it. The book was complicated, and full of words that I didn’t know, so my mind kept drifting.
It’s not fully clear to me what happened next but I became interested in my thoughts about something, something related to my own ‘psychology’. I became ‘absorbed in thought’ for 5 minutes at a time. Then it was 10 minutes at a time. Then it was 15 minutes, and the book was forgotten.
And at some point within the next hour or two something strange happened. It was like a switch had been flicked on in my mind. My thoughts were flowing, I seemed to be thinking with an intelligence I had never seen in myself before, and I was feeling a happiness, a stress-free contentment, that I hadn’t felt since I was a child. Or maybe ever.
In the course of that single night, because of random chance and random circumstances, I had discovered ‘reflective thinking’. I became someone who could think about life, rather than someone who simply gets crushed by it.
I realised that ‘thinking about things’ was something that I was now capable of doing, and when I was ‘thinking about things’ I didn’t feel lost, empty, lonely, bored, depressed or anxious. It made me feel fantastic. My mind was ‘buzzing’ and I felt fully alive in a way that I hadn’t for a very long time.
I wasn’t very sophisticated in those days but it seemed clear that I had discovered a secret power to feel good, and I could choose to use it any time I wanted. And, 36 years later, I still haven’t stopped using it.
I didn’t recognise it until much later in life, but what I experienced that night, and in the days and weeks after, was the mental prelude to the “peak’ or “spiritual” experience.
To put it simply, reflective thinking generates ‘insights’ that bring small clarities. When you think reflectively without interruption for many hours, huge life changing insights, often called epiphanies, are drawn from the series of smaller insights.
Along the way I learned that ‘epiphanies’, and ‘spiritual experiences’, are simply a thing that every human brain can do, that every brain is supposed to do, and we can all experience the clarity of a ‘mind-blown’ life that is truly worth living.
I had my first full-blown spiritual experience a few months later, and I have had hundreds of them throughout my life. As I said, it has been a wonderful life.
My own mental health problems simply vanished, because ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’, self-loathing, and all of things we call mental illness, are the emotional expression of things not seen clearly, of brains that have neither the time nor the space to think, to generate the insights and epiphanies that resolve them.
My drinking? My everyday life became good, and I loved feeling good. It turned out that being intoxicated ruined that feeling, so I simply lost interest in it. There are many truths in life that many would rather not hear. There is one about drinking.
If you enjoy being intoxicated, your every day life is not as it should be.
I stumbled upon the perfect path in life, because of a drunken conversation that allowed me to notice a book, which I had to read because my life happened to be completely empty.
If my history was different, if my father hadn’t died, if I had remained in Belfast, if I hadn’t discovered drink and marijuana, if I owned a television, if I had the normal life of a normal 25 year old, I would be a ‘normal’ someone else today, and I thank the universe every day that I am not. I think of normal life as something that I was lucky to escape.
I like to contemplate the sheer improbability of my luck and I want to share it. I want to tell everyone about this wonderful path that I found. I want to shout, “Look over here! Check this out!”, so I write about it here on Medium.
I write about many things, like happiness, mental suffering, death, romance, politics, climate change, but at the core of everything I write, either explicitly or indirectly, is the simple secret of life.
Think reflectively.
Thinking reflectively is, in fact, allowing your brain to think reflectively.
Your brain is the centre of who you are, it determines how you experience your life, and it needs to think, in the way your heart must pump blood, and your lungs must breathe air.
That is who and what I am.
In the world of the real, it is who and what we all are.
Everything else is just detail.
To all of the medium readers who have helped me get this far on my writing journey…..
Thanks Guys. I’m grateful for all of your support and the encouragement.
Michael
