Today’s experiment:

Today, it seems I’m working backwards. I started, as I normally do, writing down some notes about my reading, hoping for insights that may clarify my own thoughts. But there are lots of things happening in real life that are interfering with my cerebral life.  My wife’s aunt is gravely ill; a friend of the family, seemingly in good health, had a heart attack, not to mention illness in the immediate family.  My whole construct of compartmentalizing is getting very hard to maintain.

At any rate, I tried writing words about how I feel, but they weren’t right.

The image below is what I came up with instead of words. In one sense, it is an abstract expression of my feelings; in a different way, it is a literal depiction of how my experience with my older brother affected me. Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. He was at home for the first 10 years of my life before he was placed in an institution.

Mike had a profound influence on me, even though my childhood is in the distant past. He affected how I relate to other people, particularly those in need.

I am not prepared to say more about this today. In the past, I would have had to construct many different images to illustrate my mixed feelings. From my perspective of distance, I think the image above summarizes Mike’s impact on me very well.