I was doing some math this morning and I realized that I might still have 40 years left on this planet. A lot of people are living to 100 these days and there's no reason to believe that I couldn't do so as well. I have my health issues, but none of them are organ-related or life-threatening. Forty years is the same amount of time it's been since I was 20. That's a long time ago and I've done a lot of living in that 40 years. In fact, I've done most of my living in that time...
I remember my mom's obsession with how she "felt". Every moment of her life was spent analyzing and then complaining about her back, her sinuses, her this, her that, and I used to think, "If you'd quit thinking about how you feel so much, you might be happier. You might live life a little more fully." Of course, I could never tell her that without waking up to find myself in the middle of my next lifetime. She was, shall we say, unpredictable. Like Mommie Dearest was unpredictable.
It's no secret that I live with chronic pain, and I have done for the past 15 years, but that's no reason to get so fixated on it that I make myself even more miserable. There are people who have it a lot worse than I do; I just need to buck up and decide to LIVE instead of MUDDLE THROUGH. It's not easy, certainly, but it's not impossible, and I believe that by not giving pain so much of my waking attention, I'll actually feel better.
Take Thursday, for example. I got up to go into the kitchen and I realized that I was walking like someone in their 80s. It didn't make me feel any better, it was just a lazy habit. When I stood up straight, pulled my shoulders back and walked normally, I did feel better. A lot of how we feel is in our minds.
So here's what I'm going to do. Whenever I feel the urge to write about how I feel physically, I'm going to post a funny picture. In Facebook, I'm posting dog pictures; not sure what I'll post here. Eventually, I'll break the habit of being so fixated on my body that my emotional well-being suffers. Enough of this crap.
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NAR: (from the La Boheme lexicon, coined in 1985) Not All Right, "Don't be NAR", "That was NAR", etc.
