Live with joy

Morning work takes many forms... the usual bathroom stuff, making tea, first day of the month so pay the mortgage, pay the car loan, fiddle with my music web site to make the front page show stuff that's suitable for today, May 1, or Beltane as the Celtic calendar calls it.

Chat with you, and two-ish hours after getting up, I've hit the wall already. I think I'll snag something to snack on, and call it "done," for the moment. Probably won't touch the computer again until tomorrow.

Well, yes my iStuff is a computer, but typing on it is odd, and typing and I don't seem to get along like we used to, but you know what I mean.

Some medical things to share... My urologist told me that UTIs can exacerbate MS-supplied physical sillinesses, and that I should--and this suggestion I can share with you, with anyone--drink more water.

Now, with the bladder issues I have already, asking it to deal with more liquid doesn't strike me as a quiet, inconspicuous change to its operations, but except for that, it's good for me so why not.

Although as Urinetown does remind us, it's a privilege to pee, but looking at my stack of catheter boxes, gauze, povidone wipes, lubricants, and all that and just imagining what that pile o' stuff costs, it puts that musical's songs about "paying to pee" in a different context.

I don't think the authors of the musical's book had us members of the Cath Club in mind.

But my current experiences certainly put new meaning to the word "important." Things like your elimination system... those things are important. If your elimination system stops helping you, you die. Or at the very least, feel very very unhappy. Being properly nourished is important--actually, as soon as I save this I've got to go eat something. Because if you don't eat, you die. Eating is important.

The Chinese called them the Four Necessities: Food, clothing, shelter, medicine. They're definitely necessary. If you don't have them, you die.

"Have it or die" is pretty much the epitome of "necessary."

Ram Dass writes on the difference between wanting and desiring, and there's certainly a very interesting world in the realm of "making life worth living," and one can only imagine what people like Ram Dass or the Dalai Lama or Buddhist after Buddhist adept would say about what it is about the whole "worth living" concept, and I use medically prescribed herbs to pull me out of darkness and back to the light of "life worth living," but it's a very useful place to take one's self, to really observe, to even witness, feeling "not worth living" and then feeling "worth living."

Personally, I find "worth living" a significantly more enjoyable place. So, make the choice; and, if even in the most humble, quiet way...

Live with joy.