CRPS, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (Type 1), is a change in the nervous system that's usually triggered by a very painful episode. The bad kinds affect the brain, nerves, muscles, skin, metabolism, circulation, and fight-or-flight response. Lucky me; that's what I've got. ... But life is still inherently good (or I don't know when to quit; either way) and, good or not, life still goes on.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

How moving

I'm working on clearing out all the needless stuff from my boat. This includes unfinished projects, equipment for work I can no longer do, things I've kept only because they're too cute to get rid of, and so on. It's been sufficiently, um, absorbing that I have neglected the blogs, but I'm playing catch-up online as I take an hour or two this morning to step back and breathe.

One realization that has helped me tremendously is the insight that NOTHING IS WASTED. I realized this when I held up a shirt that I had worn for a sweaty project: it was too smelly to use as a rag, but I couldn't bring myself to wash it (laundry costs), and I realized it ought to go in the bin.

In a century or three, it will make very nice dirt for something to grow in. And isn't it possible, I found myself thinking, that holding relentlessly to individual human scales of usefulness and time is a little ... well, ethnocentric isn't even the word. Speciecentric? ... We are, after all, part of a greater reality which none of us will see the end of.

This expands on an idea I had long ago: that I don't have to hold everything inside my skin. I was meditating to escape pain one day, and it followed me in, the jerk. So I took the idea that I'm just one drop in the ocean of humanity, and as my sense of awareness grew and expanded, the pain did not -- it dissipated, being spread so wide over the whole world, and went away.

It was waiting for me when I got back, of course, but for one thing there was less of it; for another, the break did me a lot of good.

So I'm working on expanding my awareness. It makes it easier to detach from Things -- objects whose main purpose is to take up space, use up mental energy, and carry some emotional trigger that, in fact, I probably don't need. Life is quite emotional enough without the needless triggers, thanks.

1 comment:

  1. Funny - I had the same realisation in another much less spiritual context yesterday.

    I was thinking of all the years in my career in which I expended talent and energy for other people's profit on projects, which at the time appeared to be unconnected to me. I looked back yesterday and realised that none of the information I gathered in those years has been wasted. I use it all the time now and not to line anyone else's wallet anymore, but to help me see the world as widely and deeply as possible.

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