To Abigail in the Distant Future

It's difficult to write a letter about someone you've only known for a year, for them to read many years later, especially because you're a baby but I'm writing to you as an adult. Yet, this is exactly what I shall do.

You are an oddly happy baby. I've spent half of your life so far being away on trips to Central and South America by myself, and to Alaska and Europe with your grandmother. Even now I'm preparing to leave in a week for China. Yet, each time I return you still like me.

This is probably the most interesting story I have with you so far. After you had started to crawl, but before you started to walk, you had been getting over to the stairs but couldn't get up them. I've taught all of your siblings how to climb stairs at granny's house because it's a good spot with just two carpeted stairs between walls.

Most people were outside this particular day. I was sitting on the couch. Your mother handed you to me as she headed out as well. Your mother had been complaining about how much you were crawling around and it was getting harder to keep up with you. So I thought, "Well, this would be a decent time to learn stair climbing. Abigail is probably up to it."

I took you over to the stairs and started working on it. You pulled yourself up to the first stair and used it to steady yourself. The key to stair climbing is to get the knee on top and use that to push. So I helped you bend your knee, and then we worked together to get you on the first step. As we were working on the second step your mother came back in the door. We both turned and looked back at her and she said, "Really Jeff!?", because being able to climb stairs would make it even harder to keep up with you, nevertheless it's an important skill to learn and things should be learned when the learner is interested.

Learning stair climbing is a good example of learning in general. A person with a natural proclivity and interest tries and experiments with objects while imitating more knowing others in their own zone of proximal development and getting limited help on progressive and increasing abilities. Something to consider when learning or teaching anything. (A couple of these key terms come from Lev Vygotsky, who is interesting, but if you're interested in learning more about learning and teaching I suggest going through the dozens of reviews I've done on works from the history of education and then deciding what most interests you at the time.)

It's important to remember your natural tendency toward happiness. That means, at this later reading, that if you're not often happy then you've moved away from your natural state. Juvenal talks about having a healthy mind in a healthy body, and that's a good place to begin to set things straight. The larger quote in 'Satire X' is:

You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death,
and deems length of days the least of Nature's gifts
that can endure any kind of toil,
that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks
the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than
the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus.
What I commend to you, you can give to yourself;
For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.

Do not believe whatever medical propaganda about health is popular at the time. The best things I have found in recovering from severe mental and physical difficulties are all disdained alternatives from both the medical industry and the general public: chiropractic, fasting, keto, meditation, joint mobility, carnivore, etc. The pragmatic truth is in the consequence and result, and if you study the history of the medical industry for both physical and mental health you will see that's not the path to follow.

Also, mental health, which includes emotional health, isn't as limited as many people think and believe. For instance, the work of John B. Calhoun showed clearly across decades of research, if you actually read his work instead of summaries of his work, that lack of a socially meaningful role leads to a first death, which is a social and spiritual death, which results in behavioral sink across generations. Therefore, to have mental and emotional health it's required that you have a meaningful social role. It's obvious, but many people miss this. (A good place to start to understand this is his January 1973 article: 'Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population'.)

Another which I would be remiss if I failed to mention it is 'On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man' by Curt P. Richter from 1957. It's easy to interpret his experiments as showing that hope is necessary for life, and in a simple way that's true, but there is a more true statement: that hope is necessary to put forth the required effort to live. Without hope people and animals give up to the point that their body shuts down. So, whether you feel like it or not, you must always find something to have hope in. It's a necessity.

If you're doing well, good. Pursue what interests you. If your struggling, as Jocko Willink says, "Good." It's an opportunity for you to get a healthy mind in a healthy body with a meaningful social role and hope.

Find more at JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com