What if, instead of fearing it as a place we never come back from and seeking to control anyone who comes near it, we choose to embrace madness as a state of being that is not only understandable, but – every now and then at least – a necessary part of “a wise and good life”?

A short film [4mins] from The School of Life on the importance ,  nay, necessity and sanity of insanity.
The sane world is so demanding and, well, “sane” durr,  that mad moments are not only understandable but also a necessity. They are also  a gateway to figuring what we actually need.

We we can continue our doctrine of fear and control  [ and how’s that working out for ya?] or we can choose to learn,  and embrace mad moments as renewing, rejuvenating and generative – connecting us with what’s most important.

The Sanity of Insanity
images & text below are from The School of Life – though we did de-should it.

Life requires us to be very sane, and pretty much all the time.

On a daily basis we have to be responsible, polite, productive, thoughtful, patient, logical, reliable and dazzlingly successful too.

These obligations slowly crept up on us as we were growing up.
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Now, they are our constant reality.
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No one can really keep going like this over a whole lifetime.
the burdens are too great, our minds too delicate.
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Unfortunately society doesn’t give us much room to fall apart. . .
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It wants us at the desk, every day, at nine am sharp, with a powerpoint, ready to go.
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And the pressure doesn’t let up until
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we’re finally released to sleep after eleven at night. so we have no option but to keep going. 
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While, on the side, we may be drinking too much, waking up at odd times of the night, addicted to the internet, calming ourselves down with sedatives and developing all kinds of twitches and ailments.
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But, in  truth, no good life can go by without a few open incidents  of breakdown: moments when we pull up a white flag and declare ourselves to be unable to cope or able to fulfill any of our normal “functions” for a time.
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Rather than seeing this as an illness…
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We could choose instead, to interpreted as evidence of normality, and even helpful. .
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In our “crazy” moments we might be…
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lying in bed staring at the ceiling for long periods,
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seeming to make no sense,
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wearing strange clothing sitting on the porch all day doing nothing . .
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shouting
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singing
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dancing
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cavorting
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being silly in a way one hasn’t been for decades
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making some unusual new friends
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taking off to strange places.
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Naturally, such phases won’t be easy for those around us, but we could, collectively , know how to tolerate these phases without panic, as just part of ordinary life.
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We allow our bodies to have moments of breakdown and rest

we could allow similar moments for our minds.
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In any case the so called “sane world is pretty disturbed too..

Its apparently in “mental health” that we set ourselves the tasks of…
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energetically destroying the planet . . . .
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work to meet punishing but arbitrary economic targets
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leave our selves no time for anything  but work
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drown in toxic media, develop unrealistic expectations about our bodies, relationships and families
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no wonder we need  periods of true madness as corrective.
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A Good mental breakdown

A good one is where we allow ourselves
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to connect with valuable truths that we’ve lost sight of,
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emotions and insights that we’ve lost sight of or that ordinary life has prevented us from investigating.
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perhaps, sexual exploration, creativity, heedlessness,
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contact with our bodies,
empathy, ecstasy,
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a new kind of self-knowledge.
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The idea is that we retur
n from the land of madness
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and plant in the fields of apparent sanity
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a lot of valuable seeds that can bear fruit and sustain us in the periods ahead.
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We can, at a collective level, give ourselves unfrightened accounts of what mad episodes mean
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confident that a reconciliation with the demands of the world
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We are not automatons
but highly complicated, volatile collections of proteins that needs careful and sympathetic administration.
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We can choose to expect that periods of madness do belong to every wise and good life.