A NEW ATTITUDE

A NEW ATTITUDE

I had thought for quite a while now that there is nothing new in the area of feelings and attitudes, now I am not so sure that what I knew to be true is so. Here is what has happened so far:

Until about two weeks ago it looked as if I could expect to live another three or four years; this is from the statistics for people who have what I have, and is a number not too far from the average expectancy for all men in this country. I am well aware that these statistics imply and I intend to do anything that I can to come out on the far side of that bell-curve; I also found the study that found people with heart failure often over estimate how long they have to go. I had asked a few medical people, found more than a few articles online that all said about the same thing. My chore had been to get my head around that notion, to accept what was and then to get on with my life.

As I wrote a week or so ago I had an appointment with someone who discovered that I have severe apnea, but that with treatment I can expect to add perhaps four years to this cruise that I am on. And one other thing, he now has probable cause for something that I had been told many times was idiopathic. Treatable and redeeming–quantity and quality.

In effect I have just have just been offered a doubling of my expectancy; this idea is taking a while to root in my cranium and germinate, but it will. There are events and situations all through life that cause feelings and attitudes; except that this business is different, what I am feeling and how I am seeing the world is not quite like any I have ever experienced. I am not ready to say that this is unique, it might just be a variation on one or more, I just can’t say yet.

Obviously I am happy with the news, I have long ago discarded any wish to be dead notions; have reached the conclusion that whatever pains and discomfort come along, no matter how intense, they cannot overwhelm that of being, of becoming. This new thing is a testimony to perseverance, to scratching at the tunnel face until the gold vein is completely discovered; and for that I am relieved, perhaps more than a bit smug. This that I have just received is a gift, more to God than from; but it is such an overwhelming gift that no words are appropriate. Perhaps it would be as if someone gave me a new car–then I see that it is a brand-new Rolls convertible; what the hell do you do with such a thing! A great problem to work at as I go on.

I may write more about this as I figure it out and believe it would be of interest to someone, anyone else. Let me add one more thing: To say that this is more a gift to God than from God is because I know that without man God is irrelevant; He is what we are about, that makes us what we are.

A Refurbished Part for the Engine

I have never had the imaginative cues that would have me starting a book nevertheless a saga, I have never done much writing at all other than journals and these few unscripted scribbles, so I don’t know the rules or guides for starting a new chapter, finishing another. About all that I know is intuitive aided by the thoughts of just a few authors and a friend or two.

I know intuitively that I have just completed a chapter of what voyage.

Without resorting to those rules and guides for either novels or non-fiction writing I figure that a chapter has characters whose role grew, diminished or evaporated through the circumstances that the protagonist experiences and how the characters may fit and be important, appropriate or irrelevant. Out of the weather of events and fates the main character emerges into the next chapter a different person, one who is more fitting to his fate. Routes and passageways have been explored carefully so as not to damage the keel although the loss of a little hull paint is no great price as it will be replaced at the next haul-out.

It is not that there are or ever will be winners and losers, instead there is a crew who may or not be aboard for the whole voyage. One plans then begins a cruise with the idea that the plank owners, the original volunteers and the paid crew will be there at the final port; there is no reason at all to believe this, it is a wish coming from inexperience and love. At each port along the way there is the opportunity for some to leave and some to sign on; there is languishing on docks ahead a few whom I have no reason to choose or be chosen because they are as yet unmet. There may or may not be berths open at that time, and once leaving port it is rare to return to sign on someone who had been left on land.

Yesterday I was informed that the engine needed a new auxiliary part and that it would lengthen the time I can be at sea and maneuver me more easily through squalls; this addition came as a complete surprise to the engineers but it will be installed shortly.

Right now the pilot is obtaining charts of what opportunities have just been offered by the current repair, the charts he thinks he needs are now being drawn as the previous are now out of date and will be stored away in the map drawer. Like all charts they provide information, but no chart, no meteorologist, no pilot knows all that lays just beyond the horizon—and that uncertainty is what makes everyone anticipate the long cruise. The pilot has a few more lines from squinting in bright sun , he is not as quick to bend or haul a line as he had been, but this is of little concern because the tackle we carry has been proven and maneuvers well practiced.

The boat will make a test run of but a few days to check out the maintenance and fitting of the rig while thinking again on those new charts that are arriving piecemeal from the cartographer. The anticipation, that anticipation, tomorrow’s anticipation sparks the crew-ready to embark and hoist sails.

POSSIBILITIES

POSSIBILITIES

It is possible to cherish something so much that I destroy it.

It is possible to desire someone so much that I frighten.

It is possible to proclaim so loudly that they cover their ears.

It is possible to do and be all of those efforts; but it is necessary that I try again today and then tomorrow.

The possibility is the prize.

Proof of spring

Buds have formed on the iris outside my window; I noticed their thickness as I went out to pick up the morning paper. I went without a jacket, just a shirt over my undershirt, jeans over my pajamas. The light air felt good and let me think that I might be able to open the windows again today; they were open yesterday for the first time since October, letting wind erase all that winter staleness. A previous tenant had been a smoker, something I didn’t know for about four months after I moved in; then the residue began to bleed through the paint, over the winter that fustiness was captured inside the apartment, a reminder of the decades when I smoked a pipe. Now it is gone, will be gone until next fall.

Relief of another kind came with my internist recommending that I go to the Pain Management Clinic of the Rehabilitation Institute , this option had been in the back of my mind for some months, but like many of us I had planned on taking a tablet three times a day and life will then be just right. This clinic employs the variety and combination that are available from a large teaching hospital, and they are not limited to old-line medical methods. Just knowing that I have an appointment, that a team will evaluate and suggest a plan for me is a relief in itself.

Just seeing the filling bud of the iris confirms that the hard winter is over, that a pleasant and warm time is ahead.

It would be good to have that feeling about friendship, about love, about the future; unlike spring, unlike better medical options there are human situations that have little or no promise, for those dull and lifeless futures I rely on that that I know cannot disappoint, that cannot be changed, that I found when I faced imminent death a decade ago. The knowledge and peace I experienced then will always be with me, was always there even when I was too obtuse to realize it. It is something that everyone has, that doesn’t come from outside, from another authority, from doing good acts or not; whenever I come across as a bit weird and preachy it is from this knowledge that transcends all religions and cults, has always done so.

I am as pleased as anyone to enjoy this change in seasons, as refreshed as the next person; but I am saying that it was something else that supplied happiness and truth during the long and cold winter, as it will during the next.

Frying

Everyone is familiar with the notion that life can be pictured as a leaf floating down a stream, moving from place to place, occasionally caught for in an eddy or against a pebble, stays for a while before moving onwards and downstream. It is a pretty good metaphor, but what about this one:It is as if I am a piece floating in hot oil, where it touches my outside there is sizzle, after being in it for a short period I develop a crust that protects my inner part from drying out, from being denatured. I float on the surface, I bounce from interaction to incident, being heated by the very hot grease, but not burned.

Yesterday, because of weather delays at O’Hare and the nature of the fare & pay system I earned less than minimum wage for the day; on the other hand I was paid while I was reading volume 3 of Tillich’s Systematic Theology , a book that will take me the rest of my life to read, a book by someone who still surprises me with the depth of his understanding; not paid very much while I reading him, but it wouldn’t be right to be earn big bucks while doing that.

I drove a couple of young corporate types out to O’Hare, their studied shallowness and superficiality pained me to experience. “I was like”, “he was like”; every fourth word was “like”, every fourth word was like experiencing a sleet storm hitting my face; but then it was over, they went on their shallow and controlled corporateness.

Yesterday I was informed that I had a ‘charge-back’ on my pay, a passenger from weeks ago disputed that I should be paid my full gratuity because he was unsatisfied; I remember the order, it was fucked-up from the time it was phoned in until the moment he left the car, nothing about it went right, just the way things go sometimes. It cost me almost a day’s pay; on the other hand there has recently been additional $100 bills handed over at the end of a few orders, just the way things go sometimes.

A couple of days ago I had the painful experience of not being able to see my dying friend Bert, he had just been returned from the hospital and was not to be disturbed; that I am not allowed to know his medical condition, that I am just the anonymous and occasional visitor is a role that I know, it is a well reasoned and predictable role; but it hurts to be turned away, turned and kept ignorant of his condition. On the other hand I have had the warmest smiles from that man that I can remember in my whole life, smiles that were so pure I could barely stand them; it is because we have no history between us, have no agenda between us, that those pure smiles and a thank-yous can happen.

Relations between my landlord and myself are strained, they were never close even though he lives nearby, but they have now been strained; the beauty of the tenant lease defines what I do, what he does, there is no mention of friendship or cordiality, that ain’t part of any lease or contract, that is the beauty of it.

I am back up to 375 mg. of Lyrica; it makes me a little drunk in the morning, but the fibromyalgia pain seems to be gone, I am going to stay at this level as long as I can.

It is now before dawn, I am alone; in order to understand and move through all of this, being alone is necessary; sometimes I am lonely, the loss of family and friends is painful, should be painful, but it doesn’t destroy me.

A few people will read what I write, almost no one who I know face to face; anonymity allows me to write about this journey just before dawn on a Friday in early springtime. I do think that this can be viewed as a journey in boiling oil, oil full of energy and the ability to change who I am on the outside, if I don’t have some sort of crust on I would be destroyed. After a while my time in the oil will be done, I will be removed, as will each and every one of us; the trip is eventful, it is painful, it is hot, it is disturbing, it impinges, it is wonderful.

The sky is becoming lighter in the east, the coffee in the pot is luke-warm, Aged Sumatra is the label on the bag, great tasting stuff that I can still taste a few hours afterwards, great stuff that stays in my blood and gives me that coffee jolt.

It is important to have a book, or books, that I will never completely understand; for the last while I have been giving books away, books that I never go near anymore, that don’t have anything more for me, I have drank all that is in there; certainly I have the Internet for data, for searching; but I have a few actual books that move me each time I open one of them. I once read that the Bible is not holy unless it moves the reader in a spiritual way, only then it becomes holy, and for just that time, otherwise it is just a collection of works decided on by some guys on an island a couple of centuries after Christ died, guys who needed to stitch together an empire of land and thought.

I am going to have a morning nap after reading a few pages of Larry McMurtry’s Telegraph Days, loaf around until it is time to go back to work.

New Flannel Sheets

There are few places where I feel more uncomfortable than Bed Bath & Beyond, but sometimes a guy has to do what a guy has to do; I needed two soup bowls, a dinner plate and more than one wine glass. From previous forays I know what I want, where it is located, the passageway to and from that location; plain white, open stock tableware; similarly with glasses. As I was escaping to the checkout counter I was confronted by a bin of clearance items: sitting on top was a set of twin sheets, full cotton flannel, $15; so last night I went to bed in comfort reminiscent of being a kid in an Ontario winter. There was no timely reason to get out of bed this morning, I don’t go to work until mid-afternoon; the temperature outside was below freezing, the apartment has poor insulation; I lay in bed until about ten; flannel sheets are a wonderful invention, everyone should know of and use flannel sheets; perhaps they do, it has been a while since I was familiar with someone else’s sheets.

What to do for the few hours I was awake, or sometimes awake? I have mindfulness exercises that fit well into that situation, I practiced them for a while; but then I thought about writing a post, this post, what would I write?

I saw the Sean Penn movie last night Into the Wild: Glenn at the video store told me that he found it better than he thought it would be, that was good enough recommendation; I watched it in two parts, the first was on the edge of boring and predictable, almost to the point where I would leave it unfinished, later I did watch the balance, found it haunting. The defining of a life.

It is difficult for me to be comfortable with a paradox that I know: Being in itself is meaningless—-It is necessary for each being to have meaning. That’s the thing that tugs at me, has made me uncomfortable for some time now.

When life here ends there will not be a tear shed by any Master Mechanic of the Universe; before we became aware God was irrelevant, after we are gone God will be irrelevant once more. The divine is what separates us from trout and cows, divinity is what makes us unlike any other being. What that divinity or divine is is the source of countless descriptions and arguments, and should be because it is at the boundary of our understanding. It is what art is about.

Having writ that I look at that modern predicament of an absence of meaning; the signs of the void are most clearly seen in the young: youth lasting for decades, so much attention and value are put into the shallow and the superficial, that universities are now vocational training institutes, that children are trained to be good corporate citizens. It is not anyone’s fault that this happens, it is just the way things are; there is no Great Depression to survive, no Great War in which to fight against clear enemies, no Great Recovery and re-building, etcetera. We need a foe in order to define what and who we become; right now there ain’t one.

So that is what I pondered on and off for a few hours inside my brand new flannel sheets; the daydreams of the young or the old, the observations of someone who has had his foe, has found his pattern, who learned the necessity of meeting what was preventing me from being myself, and going on from there.

More about options

There is more to say about options than my preachy statement a couple of days ago; I didn’t write about suicide from the attitude of a conservative, of one who needs to tell others in order to keep the spotlight diverted from myself (or maybe I did); I have been there, I know the territory intimately, lived there for decades; anyone who has read my Lydia post knows this. Some days it has been difficult, and some days just really, fucking tough, some days are wonderful; that is how I learned the difference between optimistic and hopeful.Optimism means that I think things will be better, the future will be good; to be hopeful is just that, I hope things will be better in the future; the first is a statement that I can read the future, which is bullshit, no one knows the future, no one has ever known the future, it is a logical fallacy. I hope that the future will be better, I hope that there will be less pain and disappointment; perhaps I can do something to help make things a little better in the present and hopefully for the future.It is important to live with just what is; I have had anxiety problems since I was an infant, there are days when the anxiety is high, when I am so uncomfortable that I can think of nothing else, and then there are days when I thought that I would do anything at all to stop the pain; there are days when the joy of being is all that any human could wish; those are the days that are dealt to me, the only ones I have, the same as everyone else.

I was not conscious of it, but I had an intuition that below all the turmoil of anxiety, and its cousin depression, there was, is, something within me that is solid beneath the waves of the storm; even though it took me a long time to see it directly I knew that there is something superficial to anxiety, to guilt, to disappointment, to loneliness; I can’t describe it, it is beyond words, images or sounds; everyone is capable of trying to know it, writers have been attempting for thousands of years to describe it. I am trying to say to those who may not yet looked at it—there is more to all of this than what is going on today in your life.

I don’t always know that that I wrote above, I sometimes forget or am blinded; yet, behind the scenes, there is that glimmer of knowledge, that source of joy, even though we all know that we must die; the special nature of humans is that we can see that we will die, and yet I can know the joy that almost bursts my seams at times. It is a strange business this being human, that we know we exist makes us special, that we know that we must die is also knowledge for us alone; and that we know, have known since the day that guy in the desert proclaimed it, that there is something deeper, imperturbable. And that’s the way it is.

I filled the bird feeder even before having coffee this morning; I had to go out and move the car, I parked it last night in a place that invited a ticket, before coming back inside I dumped a load of seed into the hopper. The area under the feeder is tanned with swollen seed that the birds can’t eat, it had fallen and become wet, then frozen, then wet…. The dead sparrow lays there still, it has been there for about a week; I thought that I might push it under the bushes, out of sight, but then I didn’t, I want to see what happens to it.

I had intended to write more about vegetables today; what I do when I go to the produce department, how I match the vegetables and whatever meat or fish that appeals, that kind of thing. But I didn’t; I wanted to put down here for those who have trouble admitting it that I know how it feels, and I know something else as well, we all do.

There are four doves on the ground with the sparrows, eating what is spilled by the enthusiasm of those that are at the trough; doves never stay for long, and so I like to stare at their colors and shading, that interesting contrast with the lively,dull brown sparrows.

Lack of response to ‘Jesus isn’t God’

I was surprised that there was no response to a couple of things I wrote about Jesus and God, but then I found that Pages are not published, just Posts. It is taking me a longer time to figure out what WordPress is about than I expected or wished, the time and effort needed to become facile with the features here could be spent on putting the right words down, words that someone might want to read and respond; I know that these quick posts are easy, but I’d like to start some kind of coherent string of things, ideas that have a lifetime longer than a bacillus.

Jesus is not God, the blind belief that he is misses the whole point of the Spiritual Journey, that is to have a personal relationship with God, to explore that wonderful area just beyond the mundane, the known, the easy. Jesus knew all of this, tried to explain it to some others, knew that to be rejected and murdered was necessary for him to know the true Him, and then to take it beyond that. The idea is and was transcendence, that most difficult of ideas that incorporates acceptance, forgiveness, looking beyond the mundane.

This is not an easy concept, the fundamentalists fear it more than anything else, the atheists cannot acknowledge the spiritual aspect of their humanity, the established Church erect ritual barricades to combat it, and they miss all the fun.