Chains; gifts; thankfulness

Still pondering the life-changing change that needs to be made in my life.

Awright, a little more detail will make this work more easily. It's work. I'm wondering whether it's time for me to work somewhere else.

That would definitely be a life-changing change. Huge change. Massive, reverberating change.

And there would be things I definitely wouldn't miss. Ever.

But there also would be things I would very much miss. The bright smiles. The laughter. The amazing "aHA!" light that goes off in the eyes, on the face, in the very soul, of someone who has just experienced that beautiful diamond thunderbolt of changed awareness.

And dammit... that's my quality of life we're talking about here. And I ain't ready to give that up.

There are things that need to be different. Hugely different. A massive, reverberating difference. But the place that has to start, is me. Because I can't change my environment. That's been part of the problem—I've been trying to change it. And I can't. It doesn't want me to change it. Or anybody to change it, as far as I can tell.

In an earlier post, I talked about the meaning of the tarot card "The Devil." And how the "prisoners" are chained by choice. By their own choice. As Marley's ghost said of his chain in The Christmas Carol, "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

M.S. is all about "against-ness." Immune system that's going nuts and chewing on itself. Nervous system trying to work around the damage the immune system has caused. The sufferer trying to figure out what signals his nervous system is sending him are true, which are false, which to trust and which to disregard—which choices themselves can be incorrect, because the "target" is always moving.

And here, I'm suffering from self-imposed against-ness.

I didn't go for conventional Western M.S. therapies because the first thing their manufacturers tell you is that they're not going to contribute to your quality of life—sadly, they'll probably rob you of it, about the only thing they can actually guarantee.

And damn it, quality of life is all I have.

So why have I been working so hard to rob myself of it?

I've got a ways to go on this. There's still a lot of processing yet to do.

But I gotta tell you, I don't know if I'd have come to realizing this but for the experience of walking the Neurological Highway. The M.S. road.

And I know that the next turns this road is going to take are going to involve sharing some of the gifts of M.S.

Lots of things to be thankful for, this Thanksgiving, it would seem. And things to get out of the way of the world trying to give you things to be thankful for.

An interesting road.