Balance in Our Lives

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Medical Doctors have been debating for centuries on what causes mental imbalances in people’s minds, where it can cause them to go into schizophrenia, OCD and even Alzheimer’s.  With modern day medicine we are fairly confident on the main causes for some of these imbalanced are imbalances in the chemicals in the brain and death of the brain cells that surround memory functions. In this modern day we have been able to increase our lifespan to such long amounts of times that our brains our dying before our bodies are and this is the reason to why so many seniors are developing Alzheimer’s. There is debate on what we can do to help stop, slow down or cure these conditions; one of which is that studies show that when people read more it increases the amount of connections in the brain, essentially making it healthier. With this increased brain function, there is a lower statistical probability of attaining such medical conditions like Alzheimer’s and paranoia schizophrenia. These areas are debatable and areas of hot topic, the author Salman Rushdie takes on this case in Harmony of the Spheres

When reading Salman Rushdie’s  East, West in the short story Harmony of Spheres I seem to recall some madness of my own that I experienced first had with my grandmother. I always knew her an intelligent, hard headed, storytelling woman; but as she grew older she started showing signs of Alzheimer’s. It was hard to see her losing her grip on reality and not remembering the basic things that she held such pride to, her own memories and experiences. Although the ultimate cause of Alzheimer’s is still unknown I still ponder if it is simply just imbalances in her life, her brain, etc.

While reading Harmony of Spheres we can see that Elliot is not balanced at all he is diagnosed with paranoia paranoid schizophrenia.  He often refuses to see his closest friends believing that they are Martians.  He is also visited by spirits and has been picked up by the police for driving in the wrong direction with a blindfold on. At this point we can clearly see that his life and his mental capabilities are severely imbalanced.

His friends and family know him to be brilliant. “Between attacks he is perfectly normal.” (130)  He is a published author of a book studying occultist groups in Europe. But after his suicide we see that how truly unbalanced his life has become. His best friend and narrator of this short story Kahn, went through his papers and his books. We believed that these were his notes for his newest book but we soon found out that they were “hundreds of pages of operatic, undirected obscenities and inchoate rants against the universe in general”.  (143)

In these ramblings he finds that Elliot wrote many fantasies about his wife Mala. Although Elliott’s wife Lucy writes off the ramblings as him being ‘sick’, Kahn could not help to ponder whether he kept his spiritual mind imbalance. Kahn believes that it is Elliott that is sick and is the one that has an imbalanced life, but he soon finds out that those fantasies where not fantasies and that his life was not as balanced as he once thought. His  own pitfall, the thing that caused him to be imbalanced was his friend Elliott, he worried about him too much and sympathized for him too much to a point where it drew his own wife away to that very person and caused his own imbalance of his life.

We should take from this short story is that we should not take for granted all of the things in our lives, we should not be preconditioned with our jobs, social life, etc over all of the other parts of our lives. If we do so then we shall be in our own imbalance, and then we may submit ourselves to our own imbalances whether they may be OCD, Alzheimer’s or even in the case of Elliott paranoia schizophrenia. I believe that we should balance our lives so that we do not concentrate on any one area and enjoy our lives to the upmost capabilities so that we can have a balanced life.