That Question

Oh, I had such plans for today.

I intended to hit the store, come home, write music, and make dinner (with enough left-overs for lunch tomorrow).

Got everything done, surprisingly enough; especially surprisingly, given that I pretty much ran out of "standing up" ability just as I was finishing the dishes. Unfortunately, getting "everything" done doesn't include the "write music" part, which was the thing I had hoped to do the most. Sacked out for a few hours this afternoon, which I guess I must have badly needed to do. Which I suppose is reasonable enough, given that I'm feeling out of musical creativity again.

This has always been the hardest-to-take part of the M.S. experience. Ever-increasing decrepitude of the body is easier to accept; I've been greeting that since I turned 20. Not that I've been fading rapidly or anything like that! But one experiences "I used to be able to do that in such-and-such a way, and I can't any more" throughout one's entire life. But until the M.S. hit, I've never been robbed of creative energy. "Out of ideas," that's normal, that's par for the course. But unable to have ideas? Being robbed of the power even to have ideas? That's a gift of the M.S.

I suppose the real lesson here is un-attachment; un-attachment to "the way things were." Certainly, I have created some interesting and creative things since the M.S., and enjoyed taking new roads. But the old roads... I wasn't ready to give them up. I'm not sure that I'm being called to give them up entirely and expect that they'll never return... isn't that just a different kind of attachment? Attaching to the loss, rather than giving up the possession?

'Cause "getting rid of the M.S.", that ain't going to happen—not that the M.S. can't change, or anything like that, but I can't through some sort of "doing" make it disappear. But changing my consciousness? That's another matter.

And being called to change one's consciousness—the human condition, too. And as I've often said, M.S. is nothing but the human condition, writ so large that we can no longer pretend that it ain't happening to us.

And so, where does that leave us? The same place that we were the day we came home from The Diagnosis, or from a marriage, or a birth, or a graduation, or a death, or any major life change... The place we were when we first heard That Question...

Now what?