is that what you really want?

Thinking about some dissonances in the past... which may be current issues for some in the MS community.

A friend of mine, as I wrote about yesterday, had very much the same end-of-work experience that I did; details omitted to save space, but "the same" and "soul-sucking" will do for now.

Soul-sucking is something that I participate in and need to work on NOT participating in from now on... getting one's soul sucked well, sucks.

But here's what I discovered? Settled upon? Realized? Whatever... The Enterprise, the faceless nameless whatever that actually runs the organization... Perception and understanding are as central to its operation as it is in a plain-old human, as one might expect from something that is comprised of, well, humans.

"Injury," the Enterprise understands. Everybody has been injured somehow somewhere sometime, maybe as trivial as a paper cut or as serious as a broken bone. But the basic pattern of "injury" is well understood: Something Bad happens (for whatever reason, which doesn't matter because...), the Injured Person is sidelined for some amount of time; may be inconvenient, don't know exactly when it will end but it will end, and then everything goes back to normal just like it always was, or pretty much enough like it always was that The Enterprise can live comfortably with it.

MS is another matter. It doesn't have a clear cause. What happens when you have it, nobody knows, but however it is effecting you, you need dare I say "accommodation," as the ADA puts it. And the MS... never goes away. Never. And once you and The Disease are there under the umbrella of The Enterprise, everything has changed. Everything. And you yourselves know what the "everything has changed, now what do I do" situation has zero clear and easy-to-live-with answers. You just gotta deal with it.

"Deal with it" is something The Enterprise can't do. The Enterprise abhors being told that it has no choice and it has to do something. The Enterprise is always quick with A Better Idea that actually is not better but significantly worse, as far as practicality goes, but since The Enterprise doesn't live in the world it creates, as far as effecting said world goes, The Enterprise neither cares nor notices. "Not my world," as far as The Enterprise is concerned, assuming it's capable of that kind of self-reflection.

And thinking about it here and now... oh boy, do I ever have more important things to do than berate myself for other people's blindness. My job is to forgive them; if I speak darkly of them, my job is as Ram Dass so often writes, love God and tell the truth. Not forgiving them and staying angry does not, I imagine, qualify under "love God," and the only truth that I can actually tell is my own; at best, all I can say truthfully is "to me, they appear blind" rather than "they are blind," although I may be able to deduce their "seeing" ability, or lack thereof, the only way I can really know what they see is to be telepathic, which I'm not, as hearing some of the exchanges with my wife will quickly prove.

So where's the "gift" in all this? Blind people screwing up your life?

No... the gift is in understanding. Being significantly disabled (e.g., bound to a wheelchair) I see, and understand, and have compassion for, people who are disabled. And The Enterprise is significantly disabled; it cannot see, it cannot understand, it deludes itself, and complicates its own existence. It may cause me something unpleasant, but finding that pleasant or unpleasant is on me. Its blindness, its ignorance, and indeed its suffering, is on It.

But even so... who thinks it's a good idea to work at being more disabled?

Is that what you really want?