WHAT IS MENTAL HEALTH?

It’s #MentalHealthAwarenessDay, or #WorldMentalHealthDay, or whatever it is they’re calling it this time round (I prefer the former), and my daughter was encouraged to wear yellow to school today, as a result.

We got to talking about it on the walk in. Curious, I asked her, “What d’you reckon the most important thing to remember about mental health is, lovely?”

Now, she’s been through the iHeart Principles home-study ‘Ignite’ Programme (you should check it out for your own kids - it’s great!) and when Dad asks her a question like that, she treats it as a test, with a right and a wrong answer.

She’s well versed, so I got, “Well, when anything happens, you can ask yourself the question, ‘Does it look like something outside of me is taking away my wellbeing?’ and that will tell you whether or not you’re on the ‘attached wellbeing’ path. And that’s not how it actually works.”

Pretty good, in a multiple-choice kind of way, and I’d like to think she puts this in to practice in her more reflective moments, but you’ll note that just like a politician (or every client I’ve ever worked with) she’s not answered the question I’ve asked her. She’s instead given me an answer to a question she wants to answer. Classic.

I pushed, rephrasing and focusing a little. “So, where d’you reckon mental health is, then?”

She paused. “In your heart? No, ummm, your head. Oh. No. Umm, oh, I don’t know, Dad.” (At this point probably wishing we could instead talk about how she can almost touch her nose to her knees when stretching, or what happened when a wasp landed on her apple at school, or anything other than this boring Dad stuff.)

Sensing myself about to launch helplessly into a baffling description of “inside-that’s-nothing-to-do-with-any-part-of-our-bodies,” life intervened and rescued me, as at that point we walked out from underneath a tree, into a fierce, low autumn sun that was busy burning off the early morning mist.

“Well, what if mental health was nothing to do with our bodies at all? What if it was a bit like the sun?”

“Always there, you mean, Dad?” (She’s heard this metaphor before, and like you and me, needs reminding of it once in a while.)

“Exactly that. And do you think the sun needs ‘looking after’?”

“No, of course not. It looks after itself!”

“Can we always see the sun, during the daytime?”

“No, we couldn’t see it first thing this morning, could we? It was covered up by the mist. It’s really bright now, though, isn’t it Dad?”

“It is, my love. You know, maybe that’s the closest we’re going to get to describing what mental health actually is: always there, doesn’t need looking after, sometimes gets covered up.”

“By our thinking, Dad?”

“Exactly that, kiddo.” (Like I say, she knows the score.)

***

We walked for a while, talking about wasps and friends and traffic lights and Autumn being her favourite season and how awesome it is that we just saw three leaves fall off a tree all at once, when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I spotted a volley of sun rays, slicing through the mist in the valley beneath our feet.

I stopped, back-tracked a little and pointed it out to her, through the gap in the trees we’d just passed.

“WOWWWWW!!” we said, in unison.

We stood there in silence (notable on a walk with a 9yo), just marvelling at the light, the grades of shade, the spiders webs glistening in the sun, the spectrum of colour in the leaves, the subtlest shade of blue above… and we rested in mental health.

Because that’s the other thing about it: Mental health is always Now. It can’t be anywhere or anything else, because everything else is the clouds of our thinking, obscuring the omnipresence of innate health.

“Take a picture!” was her eventual first utterance (and mine, mentally, if I’m being truthful with you) and I did, and of course it’s lovely and it’s a reminder of that moment, but the feeling of peace — of mental health — we both experienced in that moment had nothing to do with the sun, or the mist and everything to do with just being.

Being. Present. No labels. No judgement. No Dad, no daughter, no past, no future, just life.

And here’s the deal: to stick this feeling onto something “outside” of the moment is the ‘attached wellbeing’ route all over again, and it’s a slippery slope.

Because before we know it, we’re back at square one, where it looks to us like we can’t experience mental health unless the conditions are just right for us: the sun has to shine, people have to be nice to us, work or school have to be going ok etc etc.

But that’s not how it actually works.

There is no barrier to entry for the experience of mental health. It’s waiting for us every time we fall out of our thinking about life and instead go about our business, at one with life, be that looking at trees and sunlight, dropping wasp-invaded apples, waiting for ages at traffic lights, watching leaves fall or even arguing with our friends.

And as I write this, I realise that maybe she did answer my question, after all.

Giles