11: Life in crisis
Life-threatening illness impacts on perception of life; we may or may not feel we can focus on death, death may seem unthinkable, unspeakable. Equally, we may be attentive or inattentive to life.
These notes cannot tell anyone how to live or die.
We live life from the inside, each of us with measures of thoughtfulness or thoughtlessness, happiness or misery, day to day, rewriting the past, hoping for the future, allowing, relishing, hating or denying the present.
The world we walk through is constructed in our own minds.
We may take a first aid course to deal with possible crises like seizure, but we are less likely to enrol for medicine. We may rush to a church or a counsellor or a cliff edge in crisis, less likely to enrol for philosophy. But for most of the time life is something we just do.
We may daily head for the office, the shops, the bush, the mirror; disappear into a book, a computer game, a TV program, a bed, a rant, a sulk, a petulant pout, a furious cleaning of the house, a flurry of emails, a froth of Facebook, a slough of despond; we may think, we may meditate, we may shut it all in or out. Run cockroach run, die cockroach die; grow weeds, trim grass; the fridge is not allowed to die. Who left the bathroom light on? — that's what I want to know.
Who chooses what is big? What makes us laugh now, at what large and small things do we despair. Why are some large things invisible? Why are some small things so awful? Am I allowed to laugh any more?
At any time in life we may or may not be open to new experience, new insight, new awareness... or not. As much as we may be open to or may fear love or banishment, new tastes or snakes (four things basic to the psyche, written into the Garden of Eden) so we vary in openness or fear of life or death.
Any of us can change – 'it's never too late to change', thank you for telling me that mother, sigh – but it will be a change of bearings and values from the inside and on the basis of our resources and beliefs, not a new person.
A horror crashes in on consciousness, everyone responds differently; everyone in the same room is, with their own validity, differently impacted.
We contribute to what others may be around us, how they feel, what we allow them to be or feel. In the business of controlling the uncertainties of life, we may each tend to control others, with or without thinking about it: either to deny them pain, or somehow thus manage our own pain. We are the parent or the child, the same old servant or rebel, the doormat or the viper or the smothering. "That's just what I'd expect him to do" — or the opposite, "She's not herself at all today."
The deeper the crisis, the more primitively we may be within our single nature, or within the way we are expected to be by others, in their minds. How well do we hang together or are destructive to self or those around us? The principle for doctors Do No Harm might sensibly be applied to how we live with ourselves and those around us. Even when we are most alone, we impact on others. No matter how isolated we seek to be, we draw meaning from how in our heads we shape who and what we deal with and then may be limited or enabled by what others expect or allow of us.
Is it possible to deal with the crisis situation in ways which allow each person associated with this crisis to feel more strength, more value to life, not to be out of control?
Now go and tidy your room, make yourself decent, eat your peas, we have to keep our act together, you know... No, I can't talk about that now.
When can I cry, who can I hold, who will hold me, does anyone need me?
Is it wrong to cry, to need? Am I entitled to be alive? Why, when, how?