Delirium

"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The word delirium is taken from the Latin root “delirare” which literally means to leave the furrow while plowing. So if one is able to break out of the figurative rut their life is following, it would be linguistically correct to say that person was going crazy, cracking up. Which I think might be a good thing, or at least not so much of a bad thing. Going crazy, I mean. Why?

Because delirium can be joyful too. I went to a wedding recently, and it was clear to me that the bride and groom were floating on a cloud of delirious love, buoyed up by the good wishes of the many friends and family in attendance.

(Funny story: when we saw the brother of the groom on the Monday afternoon after the wedding, he said he’d just returned from an afternoon of golf with his newly married brother. Some honeymoon! I’m not sure if the groom jumped out of the rut of his life on his wedding day, or jumped thankfully back into it 2 days later on the golf course with his brother.)

In order to recover some sort of normalcy following a delirium, say, that of working in the garden for the last time until Spring, you need to relax back into some semblance of normalcy. It’s raining today: make a vanilla vodka vicodin double tall latte smoothie, sit down, put your feet up, and watch the rain.

Watching the rain in the garden, I carefully consider my options. I can continue down the deeply furrowed rut of my life indefinitely. Or, once in a while, I can leap deliriously out of the ditch and scramble wildly across the field. Which is a crack up of an “accurate mind”, and which is merely joyful and therapeutic delirium?

And who cares?