Thursday, July 9, 2015

A good place to start

It has been a delightful few days. My wife is having fun at a convention in another city, a Yale friend of mine is holding court here at my place to make sure that I'm safe and fed. It has been really wonderful!

She told me that her husband had been in a sailboat that "turned turtle," or in other words, flipped over, mast down and hull up. From the boat's perspective, this is bad.

She talked about how he was dealing with the boating disaster, and being one who has had his own share of things turning turtle, metaphorically if nothing else, and a thought...

As I've said before, I have problems with "accept" as a way to process discomfort, shall we call it. But for this guy, the key was easier... just admit that it happened. "Why" does not matter, "how" can be interesting in a post-mortem investigation, but the bottom line is... it happened. You gotta cop to it. Not "why," not "whose fault is it," but that it just... happened. That's true as true gets. It happened.

And that's a way to look at my MS ... occurrences. Difficulties. Challenges. Terrors.

Where is no "why," there's no "how," and there's clearly no "fault."

But MS happened, and everything that came of it also happened.

And that's where we start. Speak the truth. Whatever it is... it happened, and here I am now as I am now.

As my beloved timpani teacher said, always tell the truth: that way, you only have to remember one story.

And Lord knows, I don't need to choose to make things more difficult for myself! Let's just start with a quiet, simple, and direct thing.

Truth.

Seems like a good place to start.

2 comments:

Judy said...

"turning turtle" Now that's a creative new way of describing coming down with MS. Of course, our turtle brethren might take offense, eh?

Muffie said...

Acceptance is difficult; however, your way of thinking has great merit. I shall try to adopt it.