Tactical.
That’s a word that really deals with the immediate situation. The “situation room”. You have a problem, you deal with it, you make the problem go away (for now), you get sleep at night. Fine.
Dealing with long-term chronic illnesses – now that’s a concept where we apply both the tactical and the strategic.
Remember. None of us leave this planet alive.
We go somewhere else and leave the shell. We all hope that the somewhere else is a good place, and not “the bad place”. Sometimes we might rightly feel that some of our human comeuppance has been already held on the planet – if you listen to the news, you think “wow, this is really some weird shit…” – “what will they think of next?”
Very complex. Very confusing. That’s why they call it “faith”. You have to have it in order to survive through those rough patches.
In the meantime, we deal with the strategic (eat healthy, get regular activity – not too much, not too little, just right…) and read all the research that comes out about what we’re doing – coffee is good, coffee is bad; one drink a day is good, drinking is bad; eggs and butter are bad, eggs and butter are good; carbs are bad, you need some carbs, just not some others… good grief…
If you can’t remember your password, you have early onset Alzheimer’s — really? Which password of the thousand that I have set, over the years, so that if/when someone hacks me, they won’t hack ALL of my accounts (naïve)… I am supposed to remember those. yeah. right.
Sometimes I am convinced that there is this great “anxiety generator” out there, making market for the yoga studios – there is something in it for everybody, right? Everybody has to eat. The people that don’t figure this out, and that they have to work to get food end up under the bridge living in cardboard boxes – and don’t call me paranoid, it just seems that there is always someone living under the bridge in cardboard boxes, no matter what we do to try to keep that from happening.
Same thing with the jerks who “beat and cheat” – kids, wives, girlfriends, whatever – no matter how it is quelled on one hand, someone decides that they won’t support the quelling anymore, so it builds up. Harper’s Bizarre. Serial what-cha-ma-call-em’s…
Oh, I digressed.
Back to “long-term chronic diseases” — So you get pushed and pulled by media and news reports. You try not to scare the shit out of yourself by reading too much of this “non” information on the net, complete with ads for drugs that look at what you’re lookin’ at and configure it “just for you” – lovely – and you may wonder, does it really matter after all? Because, in the end of our time here on earth, we will either lose that battle with some sort of “long-term chronic disease” or else we will stroke out, fall down and go boom, have a coronary, be hit over the head, stabbed, or whatever happens that will take us out in an “acute incident or episode”.
Whatever. I guess I wonder why freak out? Maybe its a wobbly. We have not yet reached the Zen of our existence. It’s maybe because we are not getting our way. Its the anger because our dreams of what we thought we would be don’t turn out as we expected. We have to go the other way, not the way we wanted to go, both figuratively and literally.
We live in the clouds the rest of the time, floating through life day by day, as time accelerates to the event horizon, the older you get, the less time you have, so you should appreciate when you wake up and take a breath every day – and make that coffee that smells and tastes so good – and go places, do things, kiss butterflies, chase dragonflies, love your loved ones, and of course, try not to leave a legend that is like “Ichabod Crane”, but rather one that everyone remembers fondly…
Maybe it is just how we are, and we are realizing more about it every day. I wish I could be back in time to interview my relatives who are now unreachable such that I could understand their thoughts, but I can’t right now.
In the meantime, it’s live life to the fullest, get over the bumps in the road, ask for help moving the boulders and love your loved ones, telling them you love them as much as you can, as often as possible.
It’s important for your family – and of course – for your history… and theirs, too.
