When you work-a wit-a nature, is no fight. Always wit-a nature, never against. – Adopted Japanese grandfather, AKA “Sensei”

With nature. Never against. Learning and living this could quite possibly solve 99.999% of problems. I'm beginning to believe there is no such thing as mental illness on a societal-epidemic level. And, save for a few cases, on an individual level. Yes, people break sometimes. We have Dahmer, and Hitler, and school shooters to prove it.

But this whole concept of depression? A “condition” that a scary percentage of individuals in the Western world suffer from? I just don't buy it.

I don't think it's them. I think it's all of us. There can't possibly be this many “broken” people in a society.

And there isn't.

How can people possibly understand a culture and way of life they're born into and which it's the only they've known their entire lives? It's like asking a fish how the water feels. The fish will look back at you and ask, what water?

Learning from Dogs (and Cute Old Japanese Men)

I got a dog recently who came to me with what we'd call “emotional problems”. Highly anxious, hyperactive, and destructive. I'm embarrassed to say I dealt with him in a most shameful way at first.

Punishment for undesirable behavior. A “corrective” collar. What is wrong with him...Jesus!!! Him being a mess made me a mess. I was angry at him. I wanted him to change, to be normal, to be more human.

I dove into any dog training literature I could get my hands on. Down the rabbit hole I went where I eventually discovered the philosophy and training style of César Millan, known in pop-culture as The Dog Whisperer. Before I got the dog I considered him some ordinary reality show hack, but today I can honestly say that man saved my life. (In more ways than one.)

César fancies himself a trainer of people first, dogs second. He trains people how to speak dog since dogs are incapable of speaking human.

I could go on for hours about this man's wisdom, but one elegant little nugget of his jumped out at me, more than any other, and has made me think these last few months:

“Dogs in third-world countries don't have mental problems.”

(Probably not a direct quote, by the way, but the spirit is there.)

I recall my days living and traveling in a few of these “third-world” countries and he's right. Dogs are generally let to roam and just be dogs. There are a lot of street dogs who form packs and live in what I believe is similar to the way they'd live out in the wild. An established pecking order. The freedom to physically do and go where they wish. Adherence to behavioral rules dogs have set for themselves for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe more.

They are not dangerous to people. Nor are they anxiety-ridden or suffering from other maladies we commonly find in rich-country dogs. They stick together, scavenge, deal with spats between them, rest, and generally exist quite well alongside people.

In short, these dogs are permitted to be dogs. To live in line with their nature. They are not shoehorned into some strange culture completely out of line with their species. They are not kept in cages. Curbed with leashes. Prohibited from learning about the world around them in the only way they know how: through scent, sound, sight, and then touch.

They are also not prohibited from having completely natural and necessary social bonds with other dogs. They are not forced to stay alone for hours on end and are not subjected to unnaturally loud sounds, flashing lights, and anxious energy from the humans around them.

César has made quite the living in the United States treating dogs with mental issues caused by us. And like most Latin Americans I had the pleasure of conversing with, he thinks it's utterly ridiculous the way we take what are essentially wild animals (though domesticated) and treat them as though they are humans. Our babies. And punish them when they act up. All the while we are oblivious to the fact that they simply don't understand how to behave like a species they are not.

This makes me very sad. Sad for the way we treat our animals and sad for the way I've treated my very own dogs until this point.

We Are In Cages, Too

While I was driving home from a Fourth of July party a few weeks ago I completely broke down. I took my dog and he was frolicking around in the front yard with the neighborhood kids. When the ball was kicked over to a smaller kid, he pranced over to play – tried to get the ball – and accidentally knocked the poor little guy over. His parents didn't mind. They realized it was an accident. I apologized profusely.

One of the other moms angrily walked up to me with my dog in tow. She said something like, if this dog even tries something like that with my kid, we're gonna have a problem. I gathered that she was threatening me.

I spent the rest of the party basically in a corner with my dog tied to a tree, terrified to take my eyes off him.

In the car I looked at him in the rearview mirror and his innocent, deep eyes looked back. I'm not evil, they said. I just wanted to play.

I know, baby. The tears were uncontrollable. I want to play, too. But we can't.

We have to behave. We can't chase birds on the beach. We can't even walk down by the lake in a community we pay for (HOA) to chase a tennis ball around quietly and peacefully. We can't sniff the world and learn about others this way. We just can't.

I think we're in the same situation they're in. I think we're being denied our right to be human sometimes. I think we've made it so hard to live in a traditional human world with traditional human communities (it's against the law some places here in Florida) that we're acting up the way dogs do.

We weren't designed to be isolated. We weren't designed not to play and break bread with others. We weren't designed to have to face the world and our problems all alone. We weren't designed to sit in front of glowing pieces of metal and glass all day in one position, without natural movement, sunlight, and some semblance of peace and quiet. We weren't designed not to know who our neighbors are. We weren't designed to communicate primarily through written means, where tone-of-voice, facial expressions, and all nuance of our humanity are stripped out. We weren't designed to solve community-wide problems in a top-down, faceless way. We weren't designed to be born and then carted off to daycare so mom could “have the modern woman's dream”.

We weren't designed to outsource our culinary habits and culture to a giant company who doesn't give a damn if it kills us. Nor our entertainment to the horror show that is social media. Calling this type of entertainment “social” is grotesque, ludicrous, and borderline sickening.

We weren't designed to learn from books written by God-knows-whom, from God-knows-where. We were designed to learn from each other. Out in the world. On the job. From elders. From our cultural peers. From those invested in our success.

I recently met an incredible man from Japan. A carpenter. When I complimented him on his work and was awe-struck by how he could possibly create such perfect, simple, gorgeous pieces, he considered my reaction silly. Call it Japanese modesty, I guess. Only modesty to us because they understand where their genius comes from. Nature.

His reaction to my reaction went a little like this: it's really not me. It's what I know. I always work with nature, never against her. It's so much easier when you don't have to fight. Things are beautiful when you ride nature's waves and participate in harmony, not in defiance.

< Head pretty much exploded at that moment >

I think we've made a perfect deal with the Devil in our modern, Western society. We have unimaginable technology and quality of life. It's truly astounding when I think about how much better our lives are today than even the royalty of 100 years ago. But like any deal with the Devil, there are tricky little downsides that are hard to comprehend, or even see at all.

While certain areas of life are fan-freakin'-tastic, others are obliterated. I'd love if we could start working on healthy humans in healthy communities as ferociously as we work on self-driving cars, YouTube stardom, and editing the genes in our not-yet born babies.

Please don't think I'm downplaying mental illness if you truly have one. It is not my intention at all. But if something feels terribly wrong to you and you feel very bad and can't figure out why, I just want to throw this out there:

It's probably not you at all.

You are probably a perfectly normal, beautiful individual, desperately trying to navigate in a highly unnatural world. Be gentle with yourself.