Chapter 87. Glad to be.
May 27, 2015
Note to self: It’s always easy when you let go. Accept and let be. Simply just let be. Let go of everything holding you hostage. — Malanda, Overlyxclusive
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I’ve played the scenario over and over in my mind—ten to fifteen years from now, my doctors saying “Well Robert, apparently you were one of the lucky ones. It would appear that you had a very mild form of Parkinson’s disease”, and me walking away with my characteristic sheepish grin, mumbling to myself, Yeah, right. Whatever.
And you know what? They can think whatever they want to think. It really doesn’t matter to me. The only thing that will matter to me is that I did it. That I lived my life with Parkinson’s disease, and I beat it—I lived my life happily and I lived my life well. Just the way I chose to do it right from the beginning.
To have accomplished that task will not have been easy. Staying true to a positive mindset is an every day effort. One I undertook immediately upon being diagnosed.
Learning you have Parkinson’s is like receiving a diagnosis of “who knows” and a prognosis of “your guess is as good as mine”. There simply are no concrete answers that anyone can give as to what the disease is going to be for each specific individual. Each case of Parkinson’s is as unique as the nose on the patients face. Yet for all of the uncertainty, there’s no shortage of dismal expectations—a never-ending list of statistics that point you toward a path of negativity. That’s ok. That makes sense. Not too many people who are doing well go to see their doctors. So it would only seem logical that the plethora of information would be of the doom and gloom variety.
But I chose not to focus on that. I chose to focus on the “who knows” and the “your guess is as good as mine” as a good thing. If they don’t know with any certainty how bad things may get for me, then they certainly don’t know how good things can get either. The choice for me was simple—given the option of picking one of the two unknowns, I naturally chose the one with the positive outcome.
Wouldn’t you?
To do so I had to establish my mindset. Putting my mind to work towards contributing to my own healing. I was convinced that the levels of stress I had allowed to take over my mind prior to my diagnosis contributed to the onset of my symptoms, so I felt equally confident that my mind was fully capable of contributing towards my healing.
When you cut your finger and are in pain, you innately have confidence in your body’s capacity to mend the cut. You do not have to do too much: simply clean the cut and allow your body to do its work—take positive steps and the cut will heal on its own. You don’t even question its ability to do so. Your mind can work the same way. But you have to have the confidence in it to do so. You have to instill into your mind a sense of trust. You have to take positive steps. By learning to trust, you can clean the mind of fear, anxiety and stress which I believe acts like a bacteria destroying your bodies efforts to heal itself.
For some patients, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s creates real suffering, leaving them to think that living is impossible and they can’t go on. When we lose some of the abilities we’ve become so accustomed to over the years, or we judge ourselves based on how we think others might perceive us, we may think that we cannot survive. To have lost all reason for living is to open up an abyss of suffering. As influential as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an interior state. Understanding that is the key prerequisite to a life worth living—and in time, realizing that we can go on living. Practicing mindfulness of our body and feelings, we feel better. The force of healing is always at work in us, and we can trust it. Our ability to persevere, our capacity to let go and transcend will help us through.
Our imaginations feed on our own energies, because it is our own energy that is required to keep them alive. Use your energy to imagine positive outcomes. Practice filling your mind with positive thoughts and soon you’ll find you’re filling your life with happiness. Happiness is above all, a love of life.
Changing the way I choose to see my Parkinson’s does not imply a naive optimism on my part or some artificial euphoria designed to counterbalance the adversity associated with it. My search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding myself to the realities of this disease. Nor is my happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins such as fear, pity and negativity that can literally poison my mind and incapacitate my body. I’m learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearance and reality, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to the misapprehension of the nature of reality.
My reality today is that I am alive—and for that, I am glad to be.
More to come.
Tremors in the Universe is available in e-book, paperback and hardcover through Balboa Press @ http://bookstore.balboapress.com/Products/SKU-000956591/Tremors-in-the-Universe.aspx or at http://www.tremorsintheuniverse.com
A portion of the authors proceeds are being donated to the National Parkinson Foundation and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research
Tremors in the Universe Copyright © 2015 by Robert Baittie
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