Growing up, my parents responded to some advertisement concerning Heraldry, or more specifically, "Family Crests." They sent off and had the Coat of Arms of my mother's family name, Baird, and my father's family name, Reaves, shipped to us. They hung on the wall during my youth and upon closer inspection, the Reaves Coat of Arms contained the Latin phrase Animum Rege. Having had some Latin, I then interpreted the phrase as to mean "Govern Your Mind". Googling it today, it is more properly interpreted as "Control Your Passions." Apparently, when it mattered, the family coat of arms typically carried these mottoes within the heraldry art.
Though my brother Graham's research into the Reaves genealogy revealed the actual coat of arms, without the motto, it still stuck with me as being particularly relevant. Having so many of the Reaves clan struck down with alcohol abuse, including those in my own generation, I felt that the phrase animum rege had to have been hanging on the wall of our forebears over the centuries.
My own affliction concerns the ability to animum rege on occasion when stress enters the picture. Take painting the house, for example. I think it highly unusual, no, an abject failure of good breeding, to not animum rege when dripping paint on the ground whilst painting. To wit: for the painter to use vile profanity, living in a Christian neighborhood, with my devout Christian neighbor, Charles Love, working just across the street in his garage, was not the venue for streaming curse words accumulated over a lifetime as I spilt the paint down the front of my pants. And, being unable to animum rege, I saved my very best curse words for myself.
One can only deduce that when met with temporary setbacks that inevitably occur during day to day life, the reaction to curse the darkness, as it were, is proof positive that the ability to animum rege is not within the skill sets of this individual. One would think such a person would simply hire others more capable to finish the job, but when said person has forsaken the productive class of his peers to meddle in retirement, that would be a horrific waste of liquid assets.
So, today, while still dizzy from the pharmacological wizardry that was employed to finally send me off into REM sleep episodes, I will try yet again to animum rege when tackling a new section of the exterior walls of my humble abode. Reaching for another profound adage to spirit me out to the paint tray, I will try and remember that it's not how many times one fails, it is how many time one picks oneself up and starts again that eventually yields success.
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