Peaceful acceptance

I don’t know if there is a sleep specialist reading this or if any of you have the answer to something that I am find more than just a little ODD. This isn’t the first time that this has happened but as it is the second night in a row that I have woke around 5 am in pain and in the same strange position I thought I would throw the question out there. I have woken with my head on the pillow and my shoulders parallel to the pillow, my body is in line until I get to my waist where it sharply twists so that I have both legs out of the bed and both of my feet on the floor. In the last few months I have occasionally woken with one foot on the floor so the second one there as well is another move on, why any of my feet should be there I have no idea at all. I woke both yesterday and today due to the pain it was causing me so I must have been like that for a while. There is no sign that I have actually been sleep walking or anything like that, I thought when I had one foot out that I may have done that by accident as my foot or leg was hurting, so a little sense there but both? As I said ODD. I really hope that I am not about to start sleep walking as I am dangerous enough walking around when I am awake, I can’t imagine the trouble I would be able to get myself in to like that. LOL

Yesterday was really a very average day, without any great traumas which is nice. It’s strange how life turns itself upside down when it comes to just getting through the waking hours. I suppose like most people the days I remember and enjoyed where the days when something special happened or something just a little different, now the days I remember and look forward to are the average ones. The days without extra pain or accidents, or anything of that nature, just to be able to wake up, get up, coast through what needs to be done and go to bed, are wonderful. I realised that something else has changed dramatically as well, I no longer have days where I wonder what to do with my time. Clearly I used to work and like everyone else I had housework and thing to do, so that took the bulk of my time but I did have points where I wasn’t bored just trying to decide what I wanted to do. That never happens now. Part I am sure is because I have less hours in my day, but mainly it is I believe because I now appreciate all the time I have, every minute of it.

Your view changes once you know that your life isn’t going to go on for ever. We all know that one day we will die, but once you have an illness that will ultimately be the end of you and sooner than nature gives all humans, things change. I don’t know how many years I have, but I know they are less than I did have. Knowing that makes you look at relationship, daily activities and so much more in a different light, you also make decisions about what is worth you time and what isn’t, as the time you have is capped. It isn’t something that you sit down and work out on a spreadsheet, it is something that just changes without your permission. One of the strangest things that changes as well, is my acceptance of my own end, I don’t fear it at all and I have an amazing calmness about the whole subject. I don’t know why or where from, but I feel really peaceful and accepting in what will happen. Even knowing that from now to then, my health will go downhill and I will feel worse and worse, with more an more pain doesn’t scare me. It is just the way it is and it is just what will happen, I have no choice or way of changing it. I guess I wish this is one of those feelings that I could bottle and pass on to everyone else in the world. Once you are at peace with your life and you appreciate the time you have and everything that you can do, there is a happiness that settles inside you and life becomes a very different and enjoyable prospect. It removes so many worries and so many problems that it is hard for me to put in to words, it really is something you have to feel to totally accept and understand. I just wish I could share it.

Years End

Well we are here again the end of another year. I used to think it was just one of those things that older people said without there being any reality behind it, but the years really do get faster and faster. In my position you would expect that time would drag, as cut off from all the things that fills a normal day for most that I would be lost for things to do or to even think about. But here I sit day in day out and time vanishes faster than I can keep track of it. Looking at life from this end of it back to childhood, I would have expected the fastest moving part would have been as a child, with so much to see and to learn time should be filled completely and everyday an adventure, but tell a child they have to wait a week and it is like giving them a life sentence. So one more has gone, and one more is notched up to experience tucked away and half forgotten already.

I have always had a great desire to be one of those people who seem to remember everything, rather funny when you think about it from where I am now, but I can remember sitting listening to adults telling stories in a way that made you feel they had memorized a book word for word. I wanted to be able to relate my life in that way, and not just my life but the contents of an encyclopedias. I did actually sit down once with the intention of reading the entire contents of the encyclopedia I had at home, I think I managed the first two books and them never went back to them. I realized I was wasting my time, not because I had a bad memory then, but I just didn’t have a good enough one.

At this time of year we all look back at our lives making plans to change that or put something else right, but that is something I have noticed that health also changes. I no longer do that. I guess when your values are changed, which there is no doubt that they are, that small things don’t matter in the same way. So what if I smoke too much, drink too much or still haven finished reading my encyclopedia, nothing like that really matters. I look back over the last year and I feel really very little about what has and hasn’t happened, what matters so much more now is one simple word, happiness. To be able to say that I have spent the bulk of this year happy, means so much more than I ever thought it would. This will sound silly but it really is a happiness that give you a warm feeling, a contentment that fills you and gives you the strength that allows you to accept that life is what it is, not flashy or fancy, but happy. I actually don’t think I though about happiness a great deal years ago, my life was so much more about having work, money, belongings and a home. I was like everyone else racing around chasing dreams that weren’t actually mine, but the ones that I had acquired from friends, family and society, I like so many others had missed the point of life, life isn’t about things, it’s about being happy. It is just a shame that it took something so traumatic to teach me that, something that all the learning in the world I don’t believe that I would have grasped. It is also the one thing that I see so many others missing as well. Being promoted at work is great, but is all the extra work and money really what makes you happy, wouldn’t having more time with those you love and more time to rest and enjoy life, make you happier than that new shinny car?

It sounds such a simple thing but it really changed my life, I stopped existing and being busy and started to be happy regardless of all the pain, the lack of money and the isolation. Yes this is the time of year we all look back, but it is one of a handful of years where I can actually say it was a happy year and I can smile as it ends, I can smile because I am looking forward to another happy year. I wish all of you reading a HAPPY New Year and one that at the end, you too can look back and say you found true happiness.

Peaceful contentment

The more I speak to other who are also housebound or have a chronic illness the more I have found that we all eventually find a point were we are contented with life and cope with everything that comes our way. It is as though our lives become peaceful. I have been trying to work out where this peace comes from and why we didn’t have it before becoming ill. I can think of no point in me life before my MS forced me into my home for good, that I was continually at ease and continually happy with what I had. Of course I had spells where life was good and I was happy, I’m not saying that I was constantly stressed out and hated my life, but this is so different. The more I have thought about it the more I seem to come down to two factors that may well explain it.

The first one is easy it is stress, there is so much stress in our everyday live now that it doesn’t surprise me that so many become ill because of it. A average day for all in our modern world start with stress the second the alarm clock forces us into being awake, rather than waking when we want and at our own pace. I still have the alarm set each day be my reaction to it has changed, I have now lost the next daily stresses of a simple thing like getting ready for and arriving on time each day for work. The commute for many involves traffic jams, crammed buses or trains and being held up by others not moving as fast as we want them to. In general the entire day at work has the potential to be a total minefield of stress bombs waiting to explode when we least expect or need them, stress attracts more stress. There is a precious point in the day lunchtime, a point that we should be able to relax and recharge for the second half, in reality is often as difficult as the rest of the day. Waiting in queues trying to get what we want to eat, expectation of enjoying a tasty meal that normally takes longer to get, than to eat and normally not quite what we thought of. Possibly try also to run a couple of errands the back or the supermarket adding into the stress pull before the afternoon battles. Work over and back to a commute, racing to get home to tackle those household chores that are piling up. Sound familiar? If you have kids the stress levels are all increased 10 fold.

The second, well this took a lot more thought and my conclusion may surprise you because I believe it is expectation. This world has and is damaging each and everyone of us due to expectations. We are bombarded daily with thing we never knew we wanted until the ad told us we did, we strive to constantly to acquire symbols of status cars, houses, cloths, holidays and as soon as we have them, they are out of fashion so we start again. Once you have a chronic illness you expectations change all those status symbols become unimportant, our requirements of them also changes, for example clothes. They need to first of all be easy to get on and off, comfortable to wear, easy to wash and require no ironing, fashion them may enter the equation about here, this type of clothing rarely has a designer label or their price tags. If you can no longer work, well again expectations change as you have to adapt to an unchangeable budget, that budget is also one of the changes you have to accept and it changes more of your life than you may think. If your illness like mine means that you don’t know if you will be able to walk tomorrow, well you don’t plan for tomorrow, everything is about today.

With little stress and changed expectations and the knowledge you can’t change any of it, once the grief and anger is over a sense of contentment settles in, and life becomes peaceful. To many especially the young the idea that the latest phone and the best clothes are of no importance will sound nuts, but I can honestly say I am so much more content now than I ever was when I had the phone and the clothes.