Recovery and divesting…

The process of change continues. Today, I walked for 50 minutes…at too fast a pace, so my knees complained all day after that. It seems I never learn. A slower pace would accomplish what I need without causing me pain, yet I still pace myself to quickly. Where am I trying to go?

The most difficult thing this week has been the task of sorting books and divesting myself of many of them. I made one or two mistakes in sorting last week, and so lost a couple of books that I wanted to keep. I find packing books into boxes incredibly stressful. Tonight, I packed one box – many of the books I had purchased but not yet read. Afterward, I felt distressed and anxious, for the rest of the evening. I couldn’t face packing more books right at the moment.

I tried processing the feelings, and have come to the tentative conclusion that I define myself, at least partly, by the books I possess, either the quantity or the quality. I intend to read books, so I buy them, and then I get distracted, and they don’t get read. But I feel good about possessing them. Watching them vanish off my shelves raises all kinds of anxieties in me, and feelings of “unworthiness,” or “valueless.” Weird. Most of them I never would have read at tis point in my life. Some of them date back to 1965, and I did read them. Packing them away, likely for the dump or recycling, is like discarding old friends. I say to myself, “This is a really good book.” I should be saying, “This was a really good book.” A forty year old book has likely been surpassed in research or thinking, and so it isn’t valuable any longer. Casting them aside gives me such pain!

I had no idea that “changing my lifestyle” would involve such painful activity. I need to slow it down, for the sake of mental health. I need to focus on walking and balancing my diet, slowing down and relaxing a bit.

I had a good talk with Jeff today, and I have enlisted him for the cleaning of the garage floor, a task, which I cannot do with the restrictions, the Cardiologist has put on my activity. Jeff may have to return the Philippines in order to properly process his emigration. I really hope his appeal is successful. He has become a life-saving resource for activities that I cannot do. I would miss h9im terribly. He is such a great neighbor, one who actually lives out what he believes!

May is coming, and I have a number of matters to conclude in that month. The garage is one of them, the books are another. Part of May will be taken up with Beatrix’ vacation time – five days in Denver at her sister’s, and then a week of day-tripping to Edmonton – Art Gallery, Museums, walking the river paths. I hope I can get into that time, rather than fussing about what I have ahead of me – another stress test to ‘fine tune’ my heart medication, and cataract surgery in Fort Saskatchewan (a two-hour drive away). One step at a time…

Another step…

I began this blog to share my journey through recovery after several health disasters. Little did I know how many aspects of life would become involved in this process. Recovery began with attention to self-care, migrated to reconditioning and exercise, and then moved into the area of “changing your lifestyle,” which is where I am at the moment.

Changing lifestyles began with food and intake. Needing to be healthy, I became aware of the unhealthiness of much of the food we were consuming. Over the months, we have drastically reduced the amount of sugar and salt we consume, as well as reducing the fat content of the food we eat. Changing lifestyle choices led us on to consider our future needs so far as dwelling space is concerned. That segued into the prospect of moving, and thus to ponder the type of community we would need in a few years. See what I mean? You never know where one concern is going to lead you!

The issue of moving at some point led us to reflect upon the possessions we would want to move, and this led us to…our book collection. We own…and shelve, several hundred books of all kinds – largely theological. The local Library won’t take them, and two Theological schools will only take what they want after we make a complete inventory of the books – author, title, publisher and date. Life is too short for that.

There was a large meeting of clergy at our church today, so we spread a pile of books out, with a “Free Books” sign. A good deal of tem went. I left, mostly because it was so painful for me to watch some of those “old friends” walk out the door with someone else. If I have to put the books in the recycling bin, that will be even more difficult.  It never occurred to me that I could become so attached to books. Many of them I have read, but haven’t looked at for more than a dozen years. Yet I feel their loss keenly. In some way, I define myself in terms of the books I own, and have read, even if I have forgotten much of what I read. I mark books when I read them, so that my underlining is like a trail of my attention to what is written. Weird, right?

Anyway, this process, part of recovering and “moving on” – as the world says – is very stressful. And it continues…

Easter…for me.

It’s been over a week since I’ve posted. Easter Day has come, and is gone, but the season of Easter on the Christian calendar continues. It is the time of the year when Christians contemplate the meaning of Easter. What does “resurrection” mean in our lives? What is “the good news” that the church blabs on about, while mostly demonstrating bad news!

I make sense of this stuff this way: Resurrection was and is demonstrated in the life of Jesus’ friends after the discovery of an empty tomb. Whether or not you can believe in a physical return to life, there is no denying the ‘new life’ of that dispirited community. This still happens. Our neighbours demonstrate it: joyful Christians filled with generosity.

Good news? There are at least two kinds in the New Testament. Paul says the good news is that because Jesus dies and came back to life, he has erased the anger God had toward fallen humans. Funny…I never felt God’s anger. Only God’s care and love. This one is number two for me. The good news as expressed by Jesus, and shared by his friends in their “memoirs”- gospels, is that God’s Kingdom has come near…is in fact in our midst. And we are all invited to join i. To do that, we are urged to live by what Jesus called “the Royal Law.” That’s found in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 22:  Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.”

Love God…love neighbor (those people around you)…and love yourself  (care for yourself). Period. Now that’s good news, as far as I’m concerned, simple, inviting, and possible. All that is required is that we live this way, as best we can, and we live in the realm where God rules.

As I proceed in recovery from my various health crises, I have reflected on these words a lot. They have increasing meaning for me, and I find motivation in them for living. I have no idea yet what my “living” is to be about, but I can wait. I’m sure that will come. Anyway, for those of your who identify with the Christian community – “Happy Easter!” For those whose religious focus is different, Give yourself to yourself and to others, and God will be honoured. You will also be blessed, because you will live in a lighter and brighter world!

Another side of recovery.

My last post was written a few days ago, but for some reason the computer wouldn’t post it. So I had to copy and post it today, Sunday. This morning – Beatrix’ last free Sunday before going back to work – we attended worship in Wetaskiwin. Today was Palm Sunday in the Christian calendar, the last Sunday before Christians remember Jesus’ crucifixion on the Friday of this week. The worship dealt with the dark side of the Christian story, as well as looking beyond that to the hope-filled story of Easter. I found it a very evocative and helpful time today. It prompted me to remember my own mortality.

It’s pretty hard not to remember your mortality when you’re lying on a bed, waiting for a team to crack open your chest and start cutting up things attaché to your heart. I thought about it quite a bit, and about my beliefs about what comes after. I believe in life after death…most of the time. But there are times when I wonder what form that could possibly take. Our bodies rot away, our brains, too. What happens to all the ideas and memories stored in your mind? Does your mind end when your brain ends? I think about how no material cells really die. They simply take another form, as the cells of my body will do. Will I be dust? Will I have consciousness? Memory? Presence? Is there a “where” in which I will live? I know that there is no “heaven” up in the sky, as I believed as a child. So what is there? Sometimes I feel fear thinking of that, and then I am pushed back to my convictions about life after, and my trust in God, as I am bid to do.

I often think about fetuses, and what they go through as they are born to become babies. Research has given us hints that there is some kind of consciousness in the womb-bound person. This is their life, the place where they “are.” I wonder what it’s like when birthing starts? Suddenly to be squeezed by powerful muscles, to be pushed out of the only place you’ve ever known, to into a dark and uncomfortable tunnel, and then to be suddenly cast out into a world where light blinds you for a time, where it’s cold compared to the womb, where everything is overwhelmingly new and different. Is that what death is like? Is that what the near-death people mean when they talk about a tunnel, with a light at the end of it?

All of this went through my mind because of this morning’s worship. One of the things Ruth (the preacher) reminded us of, is “that in every beginning, there is an inevitable death; and in every death there is a promised beginning.”

How has this got anything to do with recovery, you may ask. In recovery, as one grows stronger and healthier, a person feels like they are moving towards life. But you know, at my age anyway, that life is limited, and that there will be an end. What sort of beginning will there be? And how will I know it? The mind and the spirit have to recover as well as the body, and one way to do that is to re-work all the things that sustained you “before.” I’m on that journey now, toward life…toward death.

Slow and boring…

It’s been a while since I blogged. It has been a hectic few days. First of all, I had a fall in my house, during which I whacked my ribs against a windowsill. I thought ribs were cracked, and my breastbone injured. Lots of pain, a reassuring trip to ER, and a few days of pain: torn muscles only, and a chewed up elbow, which was in the way between ribs and sill.

After a few days, the situation righted itself, and I suffered only minor discomfort. The greatest problem was the anxiety over the possibility that I had injured the healing breastbone.

“Walking is your best friend,” said the surgeon, and so walk I do. I started with 6-minute walks, as recommended by the hospital. Three minutes out, three minutes back. At this point I am walking 35 minutes daily, seventeen and a half out, and then the same back. It’s interesting that I can walk further on the way home than on the way out. I’m warmed up, and there’s something about heading for home that stimulates the system.

Visits to my own doctor have been positive. My only problem is sleep deprivation. I have no idea why I can’t sleep. It makes no difference if I take meds or not. I lie there, looking at the ceiling, for t least two hours. I’m often up for an hour in the night, and most mornings I awaken by 5:30. A problem still to be addressed medically. I finally see my cardiologist on Wednesday coming – April 16. I have an echo cardiogram and then a stress test, and then I see him. Very thorough, and usually very positive. I’m thinking up questions to ask him.

Recovery is often a boring business. You get up, you rest, you walk, you read, you eat, and you try to sleep. And all of this slowly. It takes time, and time passes at the rate of only a minute at a time. I have started at the cardiac rehab program, and there, the physio has already discovered that I have a problem with pacing myself. On the bicycle, if I don’t watch carefully, I’m up to many more rotations per minute than I am supposed to make. It was exactly the same in marathon runs. I’d be pounding along, until I realized that my pace would kill me before the end of 26 miles. Slowing down has always been tough for me, and it still is, I guess. More after the Cardiologist!