My ten-year-old son and I finally watched "the movie" this week at school about changes in the body. Fostering talks between us.
Since, as he learned this week, hormones play such a role in emotional and psychological changes, it seems that when he observes adult psychology at work and comments to me on it, we end up having similar discussions.
This week, for example, after discussing cigarette smoking, we have talked more than once about how adults deal with psychological and emotional stress, quite often resorting to some kind of drug or other addictive/compulsive behavior.
The curious thing for me is how much this little movie provoked my own thinking about adult problems. I find myself in many of these discussions feeling some pity for adults, whose minds seem both heightened and benighted by their hormones.
On the downside resulting not just in addictions, but sometimes even more serious pathologies.
Indeed, from what little I know about those suffering from mental illness, very bright minds that began at birth often face great challenges to their proper functioning when a mixture of traumatic childhood recollections meet with the earliest flood of procreational hormones.
(It makes me seriously wonder what Schopenhauer would say about his and others' adolescence. Is it the "Will's" nightmarish wake-up call?)
I don't have a remedy -- beyond the belief that warm embraces, kisses and saying "I love you" to children are forms of fighting mental illness. Only a certain melancholic puzzlement.
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