Defending My Organics

In biology, an organ is a collection of tissues joined in a structural unit to serve a common function.^[1]

Source

This morning, I am thinking about being alive. It isn't what you might imagine though, so I'll ask that you bare with me. The living tissue in my body that tells a physician that I am alive does not give a psychologist the same information. Forgive my morbidity, but have you ever held a dead animal (perhaps a pet hamster, or dog)? If you haven't, have you ever observed a healing wound on your own body becoming hardened? The minute blood stops moving through the body, it begins to clot and in the case of an open wound, this is good, but spontaneous clotting can be detrimental. 

Pathophysiology

Specifically, a thrombus is the inappropriate activation of the hemostatic process in an uninjured or slightly injured vessel. A thrombus in a large blood vessel will decrease blood flow through that vessel (termed a mural thrombus). In a small blood vessel, blood flow may be completely cut-off (termed an occlusive thrombus) resulting in death of tissue supplied by that vessel. If a thrombus dislodges and becomes free-floating, it is termed as an embolus.

Haemostasis is any process that causes blood to stop. In other words, if we define blood as our life fluid, a process that stops blood from moving will (potentially) kill us. As a therapist, I am thinking about this, because I wonder if there isn't something similar in our psychology. My theory is this: if a process causes our human spirit to stop, it can potentially kill us. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we might physically die, but I am suggesting that we might stop living. 

Recently, I've been faced with some big decisions about my life, the kind of decisions that take you to other countries and ransack everything that you thought was already confirmed. I have struggled with it, because I deeply wanted my "confirmed" expectations to stay that way. I wanted the things that I hoped for to simply be. It turns out that everything doesn't happen in life the way we expect (go figure!) though. After I finished complaining privately about this, my next thought was to ask myself "What am I missing by assuming that my best hope is the only truth in the world?" 

I imagined myself then, as this organic being, and my psychological state fixated on the one thing I hoped for, but didn't see actualised. I imagined myself slowly hardening in the hope deferred. If a process stops my psychological state from moving (read: growing, adapting, learning the world's truths, discovering God), then I imagine it is potentially killing me - turning my organic psychology into a rigid, dead thing. I don't want that. Have you ever found yourself hardening in a hope deferred? Today's post is about reflecting on your psychological clots - those areas of your thinking and belief system that aren't moving and that might be causing you to stop altogether. 

The good news is that life constantly sends things that challenge your psychological state, but you have to be self aware enough to recognise when you're not moving, or when you haven't moved in a decade (for example). What things do you see in your own life that need to change? Where do you need to grow? My next thought is that I (we) have to become active in defending our own movement. That is, we should NEVER get to the point of feeling fully informed about life, and our place in it. Keep asking questions, keep understanding alternative hypotheses and keep moving.