Now and then i have a thought stick in my head. On even rarer occasions those thoughts will block up my thought process and begin to accumulate smaller aggregate groupings of thoughts that begin this process anew, untill i have developed an obsession. Now I dont know whether this topic is obsessive or just a developement of personal sense of reality and a philosophical query i cant answer. i can only talk about my beliefs and see how others react to them.

     This is a feeling i have i am trying now to put into words. its a What If feeling.

     I know a bit about resilience, as i sat on a board at a conference on resilience and bipolar disorder. i know about evolution for the most part from armchair research, although i do have college experience in it. I am also acutely aware of trauma on a more personal level. and i believe we are an example of evolution at work.

     The link between trauma and resilience is one that is hard to deny. trauma either encourages resilience in an individual or it overwhelms them. My What If is this... what if evolution contains within itself such an incredibly subtle algorythm of responses to stimuli that it could be considered an intelligence? We know from studies in fields like chaos theory and studies of complex systems such as weather patterns and the internet that complex systems behave like living beings. so maybe there is a decision making aspect to evolution. and maybe evolution decides to introduce disorders in an effort to strengthen the species. this works if you believe in God as well, that we suffer so we can grow.

Not everyone with Bipolar recovers, and most are left on permanent meds and scarred for life. I fall in the latter group, and thank God that Im not one of the former group, as i came so close to being so many times. but some are strenghtened by the experience, showing a new dillegence, determination, strength in the face of adversity, and most important of all, a newly found sense of universal compassion, which connects them to people all around an leads them to help where the see help needed and have the means to do so. this is where my thoughts gravitate... IS EVOLUTION ENCOURAGING TRAUMA IN ORDER TO DEVELOP COMPASSION AS AN EVOLUTIONARY NEXT STEP? Or alternately, does God let us suffer so we may know the meaning of the suffering of others, and see ourselves in them, and reach out to our kind? IS there something good about this disorder? we are constantly seeking for good in our condition, although much of it is an illusion of the mind, like the supposed link between mania and creativity. I must admit though that i AM incredibly prolific in my creations, publishing 8 full studio albums in less than a year. and i attribute that to my singlemindedness and determination that arose from being is such terrible situations that I grew strong enough that regular tasks , like recording a song, were light as a feather to me. Everything is lighter when you take off those ten ton shoes. And I owe modern medicine and a good diagnosis for this enlightenment.