Wise inactivity

Stuck in a vow.  A recent post from a friend about how hard it is for her to write, no matter what she does to ease her circumstance, made me wonder whether writing fiction is really what she wants to do.  We speak of "getting in a rut."  Someone has said a rut is just a grave with the ends kicked out.  That's what happens when we make a major life choice and decide that this is IT!  This will be my life from now on.  I vow to succeed in this. But you can't know what it's like and what you're like until you try.  This is similar to the procrastination problem; people think they have a problem with procrastination.  But my own experience is that if I'm putting something off, I have my reasons, and they need to be looked at. 

This has nothing at all to do with my life right now.  A couple of years ago I gave up my commitments and vows one painful thing after another, and I still haven't been well enough for long enough to get going again.  

Right now all the energy I have goes to minimizing my pain, and otherwise keeping myself as healthy as possible, which involves complex things like managing my GI system, and remembering to take Tussin for the chest congestion that never leaves after the cold this year.  

And relaxing.  Shingles is not just about excruciating pain.  It is a virus that can also cause other symptoms, including fatigue.  Last night, left to myself, I slept twelve hours - !!!

This morning I turned to a book that helps me relax with all this, How to Be Sick by Toni Bernhard.  It was a useful short chapter about being wise in our actions, and how being wise sometimes mean choosing to do nothing.

A friend suggested icing the rash, and that turned out to be helpful.  The pain is at a place right now where anything touching ever so lightly hurts.  Anything, a soft cotton t-shirt.  So I am trying something another friend told me about, wearing minimal clothing around the house.  This is not sexy when you are 69.

My neighbor Cindy has been talking to me about a collage class she is taking.  We thought about getting together to do collage, but I tire too easily, so she and her daughter Lauren came over bringing me materials and inspiration from their collages.  We're hoping I can come with them to the next class.  Getting out a little and around other energies is very good for me.  So is artistic inspiration.  

Another friend and I talked about an author he admires, and that got me to reading The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier.  It's very good, deep characterization, a beautiful command of the language, so you read slowly and really put your attention into it - you have to be a creative reader.  I read some paragraphs twice, because they are so good, and think about them and why they're so good.  


And today made it to church all dressed up in purple earrings Laurie made.  Yes, I wore other clothes too.  Hey, it's cold outside. . . . And the way to get this posted is to just go ahead and do it without a photo, must get ready to watch Downton Abbey.  Love to all.

You saying this is a good day?

Irrelevant image - Tashi vanquishes the Mu (that black shape upper left)

Grandma's health update.  The shingles rash is now mostly healed, and what they call post-herpetic pain has set in.  It is more than twice as bad.  At the beginning, 5 mg of Oxycodone was enough, maybe 3xday.  Now it's 20 mg every 4 hours, if I can wait that long, and that doesn't do it.  The only worse pain I've had was labor and the sharp pain of a bone in my foot breaking.  The pain wakes me up at night and I have to take a dose.

How long?  Nobody knows.  I did get my wits together today and had an acupuncture treatment.  They are best with pain.  He actually put needles at spots in the rash, and I gasped.  And a low, easy electric feed through them.  It was okay.  

Got a mailing from Lew Richmond, a Zen teacher I like who had a horrific health event he wrote about in Healing Lazarus.  He had this to say about the koan that troubles me most -

Each of us is Phil the groundhog . . . each of us is a monk in Ummon's assembly, facing the mystery of our human life as it unfolds day by day. "Every day is a good day" means every day is incomparable, every day stands on its own. It's our responsibility to make of each day the best we can, knowing this.

Sometimes it's oh, getting my warm bathrobe washed.  Doing a big grocery shopping, being patient with the carry-out guy.  Being patient with the pharmacy not having enough oxycodone and seeming dumb as an ox about what we could do about it.  Being patient with the multiple phone calls from my doctor's office about lidocaine patches, and how I had to keep telling different people why I. Don't. Want. To. Use. Them.  (And why would anyone think you could stand to peel adhesive off this tender skin that feels like a third-degree burn.  Or first-degree.  Whichever is worse.)

And as for making the best of the day, rather ardently focusing on gratitude for such things as a pain manual from a friend - and beating Tom at Words with Friends by one point.

So, daily life, that's what I do.

Not dead yet

Update on personal body and soul -

Yesterday went to my PCP (primary care provider, as we now call family doctors) because a sharp recurring pain in my stomach was frightening me.  This doctor actually knows me, (despite every effort of the medical and insurance professions to make medicine impersonal), so he ordered a urine sample before he even talked to me.  And there it was again, a hidden bladder/kidney infection.  This one was not signalling itself with incontinence.  So I started on Macrobid again last night, and this morning on omeprazel for the stomach.  The shingles are acting like they should, crusting over, and they itch something terrible now, and if I sweat it makes them sting.  We discussed my pain medication.  I haven't been taking enough. 

As for my soul, I immediately felt relieved - the deep depression of this last week is not necessarily bipolar rising up again.  And in fact, the terrible depression in early September was simultaneous with a UTI.  Regular people who don't have mood disorders get depressed with these hidden infections, but a lot of them think they're just old and ready to die; and younger people can keep bulling their way through what they think they have to do, ignoring or drowning their bleakness or blaming it on their spouse.  But if you need any proof that we are one unit, and there is not one part of us separate from the others (like mind separate from bladder, say), this is it, living proof.

I've been so tired this week that I had to miss things that brighten my life - going to choir, coffee with a friend, having Otto over for the afternoon.  So tired that twice I forgot to take off the elastic sleeve I wear for lymphedema, and slept in it - dangerous for the skin.  In my usual I'll Conquer This attitude, I wrote a checklist and posted it in my bathroom,  so I remember to do the things I have to do at bedtime.  That's how tired I was, and waking up still tired.  But this morning I woke up to find I'd slept 11 hours, and my first real thought/sensation was that I didn't feel as bad, and my second was gratitude.

You know, you are not even in charge of your own will to live.  Today the sun is out here in southern Ohio, and every time I look out the window at the blue sky and take a breath, it feels healing.  I had a cupcake for breakfast and played Words with my grandson, whom I love more than my own life by far.  Now that I'm pulling out of that depression I can feel love again.  Even love is a matter of your health and the mix and flow of chemicals in your brain.

Now, that's all for now.  As for what I do in this blog, I just try to share my life, the reality. As for the image above, is God behind the clouds?  In the clouds?  Is God the sun and clouds, and the photographer?

Do atheists exist?

The TED talks are as good a place to begin your study of humankind as any - all these highly motivated people!  Motivated to do what?  Anything from cure blindness in Africa to swim a specific body of water at age 60.  The first you can certainly understand as a purpose in life, though it's going to run you into grave problems of overpopulation and famine.  The second, well, maybe you can see the point, but I can't.  I just never got into Amazing Feats of the Body.  Yet I've seen a world enthralled by a similarly ridiculous contest of minds, chess between a snotty kid named Bobby Fischer and the world champion, Boris Spassky.  This was decades before the personal computer could beat us all at anything.  You wouldn't believe how interested we all were in this, because it had something symbolic to do with the Cold War.  That doesn't exist now, either.  You could say it never did, just an idea.  Poor Bobby - his Wikipedia entry includes a section called "Sudden Obscurity."  No kidding.

Inflicted as I am with shingles (painful) and depression (worse) - and who knows whether they're related or just different neurons colliding in the mix - I found myself watching a TED talk by someone on whether I exist.  I won't name him or post it, because I've found it a bad policy in life for a little tiny bug to make an implacable enemy of a powerful person.  But really . . . it was a tasteless porridge of Buddhism for Toddlers and modern science.  
But this guy got himself a PhD in philosophy and went on to make a career out of talking about this kind of thing and writing books about the rock-bottom-dumb questions of (Western) philosophy, which must surely be as dead as chess by (snail-) mail.  

In that, a nerd sent another nerd a move on a postcard.  A penny postcard.  Nerd2 thought about it and made his move and sent a postcard.  Try to imagine a world that slow.  That was a world in which long distance calls cost a lot of money, and were only made in the event of a death.  But you knew you existed and so did everything else, and it never changed.  Every Sunday night Dinah Shore came out in what seemed to be the same prom dress and sang "See the USA in your Chevrolet . . . " and blew a kiss.  She does not exist anymore, but are you telling me she didn't?  I saw her. 


You, however.  No, according to this TED talk, you don't exist.  I mean, what made you think you did?  The fact that every night of your life you confront the same stubborn stupid oily skin?  Your exact  cowlick?  The food trap between the  molars on your lower left?

No, you're just a bunch of relationships, the way water is just a couple of hydrogen atoms mingling with an oxygen.  So if you thought there was Evian and Yellowstone and the Baltic Sea, there was rain and ice cubes, think again. 


There are opposing theories about existence, such as the belief that we are all ideas in the mind of God.  I rather like that, but if I were an atheist, it would make me nervous.

The Best Therapy for Depression

Music and laughter - both good therapies, legal, free, and without those unintended consequences we call "side effects."

I see it's been a week since I posted. I was right, the rash is shingles. So it hasn't been a great week. Even doctors agree that shingles is very painful. You'd think plenty of legal oxycodone sounds great, but opiates have disadvantages; notably, they shut down your GI tract. So not just stomach pain, anorexia and and indigestion, but the kind of constipation that can turn into an impacted bowel if you don't bring a whole arsenal of treatments to bear on it.

And then there's the demotivation of opiates and of illness. Yesterday I tackled the heap by my bed - everything I'd worn all last week, on top of everything I'd worn the four days before the rash presented, a stage called the prodrome, in which I felt sick and weird. And household laundry undone.

When this hit I was optimistically planning a life.  I was (am) doing PT for the broken arm, and had just driven two short drives, getting ready to be independent again. Getting back strength and range of motion in the arm has been slow and very painful, and isn't over.

And yes, Christmas day I got a cold. I wasn't over that really when the shingles hit - no one ever seems to get clear of this cold this year - but I took a leap and joined the church choir. Singing in harmony with others felt challenging and terrific. Then the shingles hit.

So I lost ground in my general fitness program and in PT. All sorts of things around the house are a mess; haven't taken Christmas down. Who cares?

This is not so special.  This is old age. I'm not the luckiest 69-year-old around, but I do live in middle-class America with decent financial stability and good insurance, so maybe this is old age at its best, unless you're the Queen of England's doggie.  I had a transplant last year (and had just begun to feel recovered from that), which means I take immune-suppressives, so it is likely this will take months to pass.

This is that present moment we talk about.  Reality.  Growing old means your parts wear down, regardless of how sunny your disposition. Every one of them.  I find I keep thinking of another song that goes -

Dance if you want to dance, sing if you want to sing.
Nobody ever knows what tomorrow may bring . . .

 Can't find it on YouTube or Googles, but I remember it, don't I?

Meaningful Work

Full moon over Westbrook's

I've known many people who were unhappy because their work was not meaningful - maybe that was more common in the 1960's and 70's.  But I've noticed that most of the work in this world is very indirectly related to reality, like doing the quality control on bearings or heck, underwear elastic.  I myself had jobs I thought were unimportant and meaningless.  One was being secretary to a group of engineers who kept the calenders running at Firestone.  So, Firestone made tires, they are made with calenders, who cared?  Now I see it better - if you can be involved in the making of a good product that's needed, if you can bring a pleasant attitude to that, it's not meaningless just because your own work is very indirect (typing letters).

Full moon, impressionistic rendering

Many people in the low-wage jobs in the fast-food industry resent their jobs and show it.  But at the White Castle we like to frequent, there is a woman at the drive-through window who is convincingly cheerful and glad to help you.  We look forward to seeing her.

This morning I called my doctor's office to get an appointment about this painful rash.  When I told the receptionist I thought I had shingles, she said "Oh, you poor dear."  And you know, I felt a little warmer: somebody knew what it's like.  I believe there are few jobs in which you don't have the opportunity to be kind, helpful, even compassionate.  A friendly face, a smile - these things are meaningful in this suffering world, and probably more important than you think.