Not all creative souls are crazy. And not all crazy people are artists.

"Genius comes from pain."

In recent decades, there have been a number of attempts to find a firm empirical basis for that idea.

Some correlative points have emerged: There is research suggesting that people with bipolar disorder, as well as the healthy siblings of people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, are more likely to have creative occupations.

People with certain genetic risk factors for schizophrenia have been found to be more creative. In 1989, Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., who herself has bipolar disorder, found a high prevalence of mood disorders among a group of British writers and artists. And in 1987, Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., found a higher rate of mental illness among 30 creative writers than among 30 equally educated non-writers.

Recent research from Austria builds upon this idea. A 2013 study found that people who scored high for creativity and people who scored high for schizotypy -- that is, behavior suggestive of schizophrenia but not diagnosable as such -- "share an inability to filter out extraneous or irrelevant material," Fast Company reported.

So that's why.

People say we're distracted. That we notice everything, absorb everything.

Dad was like that too.

We see clouds and fixate on their shapes and colors. See a hundred different kinds of blue, a thousand skies.

Our days are filled to a level of happiness in the way a teacup is filled from a firehouse - empty from the filling. For there is too much sun, too many voices, too many colors, too much sadness.

Too many people to perceive, their subtleties and existence that stream, 4G, into our heads.

We find our happiness in the admixture of change, of revolving experiences and visions. We live our days through senses, for our minutes and our days are colored by the swirling reality of the moment.

And, as I've said before, we see ghosts.

#bipolar disorder

A hundred blues, a thousand skies