It’s another early morning as I have awoken to pain and sleep is now elusive.
As someone I knew said, “It’s a funny old world.” When I received my diagnosis of Prostate Cancer five years ago, I assumed that I was about to die or at the least, I had a death sentence hanging over me. As of late, I have realized that this, like many things, was really a matter of prospective. It was indeed a death sentence if I looked at it that way. But that, was just me, projecting into the future. It didn’t have any connection with reality unless I made it so.
In my struggle to find happiness (isn’t that what we all are really looking for in life?) I had placed my own obstacles in the way. When I should have been listening, I was instead talking. In the dark time (for me, this is the winter months when the sun is low in the sky and the days are short) I let depression overtake me and wondered what I was really doing with my life. I certainly wasn’t living it. Instead, I was projecting my problems on other's lives and giving sage advice when I should have been listening to my own advice and not dishing it out. I used humor as a mask I wear, to be judgmental of others. I teased friends when I should have just been there to listen. For that, I am truly sorry. I find that I regularly get into trouble when I open my mouth and try to fix others, when, I can’t even fix myself. To that end, I am trying to make amends by keeping my nose out of other peoples business and instead concentrating on my own.
Like all of us, I am constantly struggling with the future, something I really have little control over. I dwell on what may happen, instead of being in the present and working to control the things I can. I guess that’s why they call it work. Life doesn’t work itself, instead, I have to work it. This means I must be in the present and take control of my life as I live it, without allowing the possibilities of the future to get in the way of my living my life as it is. In the now.
Looking back on what I have just written, it looks like a lot of crap. I guess that it is, but it’s my crap. It’s my perceptions as I look out through my eye holes and ponder life as it is now.
It is finally Spring. “April, come she will; when streams are ripe, and swelled with rain.” A time for renewal, for growth. I can only hope that I still have room and time to grow. I sometimes look at myself in the bathroom mirror and wonder who that old man is looking back at me. It’s interesting watching how we age. I really don’t feel different on the inside. I still think of myself as that young healthy man, just starting out on his carreer(s). As I told my councilor, inside I’m a dancer. I’m a spry, thin young man. Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth. I’m not young, I’m not spry, and unfortunately I am no dancer. My body has gotten in the way of that internal image. If I must live in the present, and I must, I have to accept that I am the way I am and work with what I got. To find serenity, I must own my own business and not be sticking my nose into others.
This spring, I will make my life, like my garden. I will try to fill it with beautiful things but work within my limits and realize those limits and be satisfied with them. I will be in the present. I will try to not be judgmental. I will try to mind my own business. All I ask of you, my friends, is that you tell me to mind my own business when I try to mind yours.
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