Friday, February 13, 2009

Life - A Balancing Act


The past few weeks of my life have been challenging to say the least in regard to my health. I have not been able to post to my daily blog. Normally I am a healthy, active and very energetic person who can bounce past most anything, rarely get colds and other than stubbed toes or minor cuts and scrapes from working in so many different mediums, I consider myself to be more healthy than average for my age. Granted I have known for several years, in the back of my mind, the creeping realization that I was starting to slide in my diet regime, eating less and less regularly and not as healthy as I used to, but always managed to skirt the issue. And skipping exercise which used to be a daily activity. My excuses were always the same, I'll do it next week. I skipped going to the dentist on regular visit because I was TOO busy or didn't have the extra money. Skipped doctors appointments for the same reason. Didn't want to have them tell me that I had better change my lifestyle.

We can fool others some of the time but we can never really fool ourselves because we are the ones who end up being the fool. My body has always spoken to me in times of my life when I needed to pay attention and this time it spoke to me loud and clear and included a baseball bat on the head to boot. I don't mean literally, but the truth is when the body wants your attention it will pull out all the stops to get it. This time I could not shut it out. Three weeks ago I came down with a case of Shingles, which if you don't know what it is, you will if you ever get it.

Shingles is caused by the same virus that attacked you as a child with the Chicken Pox. Herpes Zostex Virus. The little virus heals itself after the chicken pox but then lies dormant in your body for years and even decades. What triggers this virus is unusual stress on the body and immune system. In my case it was an accumulation of the last ten years of my life piling up incident upon incident of stressful situations that were thought to be healed but perhaps were not. And being the kind of person that I am, I took on more and more responsibility until one day the body says, "Whoa".

These past three weeks have been a time of extreme stress, pain, and many doctors visits, but in order to get beyond the pain alone, I had to go into deep reflection on the pain, and what it was telling me about myself and my life. Pain can be a healing thing or it can rip you to shreds emotionally and physically at night when there is no one to help you. No one to tell you what to do for it, and you just have to live through it. For me, writing about it was helpful, and in trying to understand it, I was able to do what needed to be done to find balance again. This will be a long road for me on my ever-changing journey through life, but it is one that must be walked by every person. We all have our own ways through things but hopefully by sharing mine with you it may help someone else who is contemplating their lives and staring real pain in the face. We can hide pain by keeping busy enough, by helping others enough, so that there is no time to look inside, but when the pain finally speaks, there is no turning away from it.


I wrote in my diary one night:

"What IS there? WHO is this pain?
It has a need to take over my body, mind and very soul
many times in the night
It comes to claim its way creeping through my being,
taking control of all my thoughts except one.
It...has my attention,
There is no other thought than this now - in this moment.

How do I feel?
I am alone with my own pain it is mine to own,
but not to keep.
I am borrowing it for only enough time to get present
with WHAT is NOW.

I AM Healing Now.

Peace....




1 comment:

Terry Albert said...

Where do you get these incredible photos- they are always perfect for what you are writing. Feel better soon!