While I fell asleep quickly, I woke up around 11:30 again. The night before was a delicious full night's sleep, so I'm not assuming this is a new pattern yet. My left ankle, which started bothering me yesterday, was driving me nuts now. I couldn't sleep. I got up several times to apply one cream or another. Did I have a bite of some sort? Was my skin so dry that it was cracking? Using the cream worked for a short time.
I went back to bed. I started massaging my left calf down to my foot with my right big toe. Okay. This is not a local problem, as it would be if I had a bug bite or broken skin. This has something to do with my muscles. I remembered a bodyworker telling me that itching was a sign of changes in the fascia. I couldn't remember what. But pushing my big toe into my calf muscle, from as high on my lower leg as I could down to as low on the foot as I could go, helped. This was exciting. I chose to interpret this as a change in the fascia caused by the recent changes in my walk/alignment. My fascia is breaking down, loosening up. Yay!
No internet service this morning. I thought the problem was with my new router, eero. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was with the modem. I called Spectrum. She connected me to instructions for restarting it. The fix didn't work. I called and spoke to a person. He had me do the same procedure. Still no good. He ordered a tech visit. Then the modem started behaving.
Last night, when B. pulled in the driveway as I was concluding my before-dinner walk, he told me he had lost his phone, or it was stolen. I thought I could call him and see what happened. Great Idea! But he was way ahead of me. He had a friend do that last night. At this point, he had already canceled his phone and ordered a new one.
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Musings:
I'm reading A Very Short Introduction on Freud. Love this series. The summaries are fantastic. I always learn something new. Poor Freud.
Given that he is the first to come up with these theories of mind, he is sensational. His unfortunate fixation on sex, S-E-X, makes his theories look ridiculous. As Dorothy pointed out, he was probably responding to the culture he lived in rather than just manifesting a personal neurosis.
One of his theories is the conflict between the sexual drive and the death drive. It sounds like a conflict between life and death. But the author of this book describes the death wish as a desire for Nirvana. Nirvana is an entirely undisturbed state, complete peace.
I can see the contrast between the drive to be connected to others, not necessarily sexually. Humans are social animals; we need to feel connected to others, part of something greater than ourselves. The other pull is for total isolation, entirely within ourselves, to be entirely at peace.
While Freud put a lot of emphasis on neurosis and psychosis, he was also concerned with how the relatively healthy mind worked. It was that quality that gave his theories last. He divided the human psyche into the id, the ego, and the superego. Unfortunately, from my point of view, he sees these three in conflict rather than three parts of the team self. He sees the unconscious mind as the uncivilized aspect rather than a healthy, significant part of us. We couldn't function effectively without all three. Just because they offer different points of view and are in conflict doesn't mean that we don't need them all. When all three are reconciled, have reached a synthesis, that's when the mental machine is at its best.
Nowadays, we understand the unconscious mind's function to be much greater than just carrying our most primitive drives. The unconscious is our mainframe. It holds it all, id, ego, and superego and how to tie our shoelaces, not to mention walking and talking.
Reading this short book gives me a new appreciation of what Freud did accomplish, not that he cares.
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