when it comes to taking the stairs and an assessment of the state of my arthritis your phrase might add a few years of being able to take the stairs in my gradually decline until i am old enough to be a candidate for knee replacement surgery. in that context i find your quote usefull. it might be, if applied consistently - nay, relentlessly! it might prove to a state achieve-able in my bipolar cycles - a state that when i am in it, might be the fulcrum from which i can move myself in better mental health. but i have a cyclical disease that is poorly understood, and most medicines used to treat were developed for seizures, or are weird little medicines in the category Atypical that have a long list of effects, that if you are the lucky combination of factors they admit they don't understand that you will feel better. the house of cards came down when i started taking a new asthma medicine whose number one warning was 'may cause suicidal ideation' and the may turned into "and that whole list of other psychiatrist symptoms thrown in just for kicks!"
in other words i flinch reading your statement. it feels cruel, and unforgiving towards the damaged and ineffective. it seems to have an inner architecture of isolation and the competitiveness that seems to be a compulsion of the western mind, and widely felt by all - competition in the sense of an word that comes between compassion and cooperation, one kind of behaviour exhibited by living creatures. as a man who had dreamed fantastic dreams as a young man, stripped from me by mental illness and a cruel world's response to that expression of my inner world was incredibly violent. i am permanently damaged. Like in Spinal Tap "if you want to get louder you go to 11." i have long since hit the 10 barrier. we got 10 on the pain scale as a daily experience. later today i return to physical therapy. parallel to the cruel world that commits acts of violence upon my person if i persist in saying crazy things - is a world of healers some of whom have enough craft to allow the natural compassion to manifest in my body as acts of healing. but the healing is slow, and the vulnerable are a constant target.
i appreciate the phrase as it operates as way of encouraging the faltering. it hurts my feelings to imagine the way people might express that sentiment who are not coming from a place of heart felt expressions of Service - "does this help?" is the stance of good hearted people, but the cruel and heartless use similar, more hatefully phrased, like the charming euphemism for firing that alcoholic who was good in a pinch and for god's sake he has a family: trimming the dead wood.
sorry to rant. in fact i wont. i will repost to my page and not polute your page w/ dissent: i feel that you post this because you think it might be inspiring. having had poor health my entire adult life - entirely invisible poor health, asides from the hippy extreme to which i have let the freak flag fly you mostly wd see a robust guy in his late 40s who looks pretty damn good for his age.
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