My daughter and my daughter was very ill
when she was… well when she was a kid.
Particularly when she was a teenager.
She had a very terrible time of it .
She had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis
and when she was between the ages of 14 and
16,
it first destroyed her hip which had to be
replaced.
And then it destroyed the ankle on her other
leg which had to be replaced.
She walked around for 2 years on broken legs
and she was taking massive doses of opiates
and could hardly stay awake.
And she had this advanced auto-immune disease
which produced all sorts of
other symptoms that were
just as bad as the joint degeneration ,
but which are harder to describe.
And so it was just bloody brutal!
You know, as a test
of your faith
there’s almost nothing
that’s more direct
than a serious illness
inflicted upon an innocent child.
The chapter’s a meditation on that,
and also on what do in a situation like that,
because everyone is going
to have a situation like that,
In some sense, you know,
because you’ll be faced with illness
in the people that you love and in crisis,
so it’s a practical guide
to coping with those sorts of things.
And one of the things you do when
you’re overwhelmed by crisis
is you shorten your timeframe.
It’s like you can’t think about next month,
maybe you can’t even bloody well
think about next week
or maybe not even tomorrow,
because now is just so overwhelming
that that’s all there is.
And that’s what you do,
you cut your timeframe back
until you can cope with it.
If it’s not the next week
that you see how to get through,
then it’s the next day,
and if it’s not the next day,
then it’s the next hour,
and if it’s not the next hour,
then it’s the next minute!
And you know, people are
very very very very
tough.
It turns out that if you face things
that you can put up with
a lot more than you think
you can put up with
and you can do it without
becoming corrupted.
The idea is that you know
You have to be alert
when you’re suffering,
you have to be alert
to the beauty in life,
the unexpected beauty in life.
You know, you have to look for those
little bit of sparkling crystal
in the darkness when things are bad.
You have to look and see
where things are still beautiful
and where there’s still something
that’s sustaining.
And you narrow your timeframe and
you be grateful for what you have
and that can get you through
some very dark times
and maybe even successfully
if you’re lucky.
Even if unsuccessfully
then maybe it’s only tragic
and not absolute hell.
And you can do that,
you know,
in the worst situation,
you can make it only tragic
and not hell
and there’s a big gap
between tragedy and hell.
There’s nothing worse
at a deathbed
than to see the people there fighting.
The death is bad enough,
But
you can take that terrible as it is
and make it into something
that’s absolutely unbearable.
If we didn’t all
attempt to make terrible things
even worse than they are,
then maybe we could tolerate
the terrible things that we have to
put up with in order to exist.
Maybe we could make the world
into a better place
and it’s what we should be doing,
and what we could be doing,
because we don’t have anything better to
do!
