Friday, February 22, 2013

Lurking "perfect"

Life in a wheelchair is a deluge of "Well, THAT was interesting" moments, which are gifted us by the most ordinary of things...

A door. A wall. The floor itself.

Things that before we were "accessorized" we never really noticed, even though they were RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF US ALL THE TIME.

And somehow, when we're "limited," we begin to see things that were always there.

In ways that we had never seen them.

And something else I'm seeing all the time, with "new eyes," as the saying goes... is how Boy, Things Have EVER Worked Out Just The Right Way.

"But you've got M.S.!" I hear the cries. "How is that 'working out' the right way'?" Yeah, let's leave that precise question for a moment; in the meantime, here's what I'm seeing...

The street that abuts my property has a lot of lovely houses. Lovely houses. Multi-storey houses. I used to live in a two-storey house.  I enjoyed having, and going up and down, stairs. My wife and I, on a lark, went through some of the neighborhood homes when they were for sale and having "open houses." We loved them. We sighed, and wished we could have bought them. But we didn't.

Damn, I'm so glad we didn't buy them, or anything even remotely like them. My current house is completely flat. Completely. Five steps in the front, two in the back. Still very doable, once or at worst twice a day.

Two owners ago (in my current home), the homeowner converted the garage into a storage facility for his four boys. With its own bathroom. The bathroom is kinda small, the sink unit is a little large for the room it's in, one might call the bathroom even a little "cramped." I had, years ago, contemplated rejiggering the sink & a few other things.

In my current state, it's perfect. I don't need to get bars installed, everything is already there, in just the right place, nice and strong enough and very, very easy to get around.

And that's just one example. Looking back on my life, I see example upon example of "It was perfect that you got that job, precisely at that time" and "It was perfect that you left that job... maybe you should have left it sooner, but dang, if you look at things now, you sure got out of there just in time!"

And now, here I am with M.S. Right now, this particular day, I seem to find it very hard to leave the bed 'cause I've got to sleep more now now NOW!

And yet, everything that has happened to me so far, when I look back at it, was... perfect; everything happened precisely that way, precisely at that time.

How then, can this M.S. experience turn out, in the fullness of time, to have been anything less than... perfect?

Time will, of course, tell; as time always does. But, even so, pissy annoyances and all, I can see the "perfect" lurking in the shadows...

Maybe, even, in the light.

1 comment:

Muffie said...

Robert, you always find the positives in the darnedest situations! Thanks for that. It teaches us to look beyond all the crap that MS brings, and to find the silver lining.
Peace,
Muff