Beautiful Sunset Last Night
The temperature was perfect, the wind was still, the mockingbird in my forsythia was singing its heart out, and then the sun started to go down. A perfect dusk.
My flowers are blooming. My rhubarb (I have tried to start a patch here for the last 23 years) is growing instead of withering and dying. The cherries on my cherry tree are being picked off by redheaded woodpeckers faster than I can get to them. Tomatoes are setting on in our little raised bed garden. The grass is green, the clover is ready for rabbit munching, and the trees are in full leaf. I saw a firefly the other evening, so summer is officially here.
I've been thinking about our own personal filters of perception after reading some comments by an anorexic lady. Her disease helps her create a filter that distorts not only her own body image but how she perceives others. Persons with what she perceived as extra body weight she saw as inferior beings who did not have her superior will power. She saw her extremely thin body as too fat and thinner as healthier. Since I have been looking at the world through my own diseased lens of pain, I wonder what distortions have come into my filters that I am unaware of.
This weekend I am going to get grounded and step back from myself and do a 360 review of myself and how I am perceiving the world and my place in it. Pain isolates and creates a self centered universe where pain aversion becomes a motivating factor. I need to cut the cage I have made for myself and join the rest of the human race!
I have to do this at least once a month in my case because I find myself pandering to the backadeebone, or rather, lack of. It usually needs a revisit every 3 or 4 days because it's so easy to slip into just doing what needs to be done so it doesn't hurt. Then I will be revved up for a day or two, then that will make my back hurt, then I will pander, then I will have to reassess, then I will rev up for a day or two.. see a pattern here? Hope it helps you feel emotionally better if not physically better!
ReplyDeleteI have a pattern of worsening pain every 3-4 days so for the one good day of the cycle I try to do everything I am able to do. Trying not to do anything on my one good day didn't help to change the cycle. :(
ReplyDeleteJust trying to make sure I'm not projecting my own pit of pain onto everyone everywhere, making them either WITH ME or AGAINST ME - never was my attitude before, don't want it to be there now. Lot's of room in this world for different people and by gum by golly they certainly are under no obligation to understand me or my difficulties. And unlike the anorexic lady, I certainly don't feel superior, and I certainly don't feel other people are in this world just to annoy or impede my efforts to live a less painful life. But if you never step back, take a look, how would you know??? I do get the grumps every once in a while, and I have used up two of my three allowed days of self pity a year already. Want to be my old cheery self again. Maybe I will just fake it!:)
I missed the whole drama with the anorexic lady, but I fully agree that pain by its very nature will make a person close themselves off to the rest of the world. When the pain is really bad, that is all there is - PAIN. Everything else fades into the background whether we want it to or not.
ReplyDeleteI hope your weekend has been a good one.
No drama Sue, it was just some health article I was reading in a doctor's waiting room last week - can't even remember the publication, but it started me on a chain of thought.
ReplyDeleteEvery once in a while God just kicks me in the butt to make me think outside of myself and remind me I'm not the center of the universe. I've learned to pay attention when it happens and this was definitely a butt-kick moment! Been a good introspective weekend for me. Time for a time out. Haven't done this since The Headache started but used to do it as a regular excercise every six months.