The Tendency of Life (Blog #668)

After two days of feeling like crud, I woke up feeling better today. In fact, when I woke up at eight this morning I felt so much better that I couldn’t go back to sleep for over two hours. What finally did the trick was a visualization/relaxation album I found on my music subscription service. You know–relax the top of your head, relax your shoulders, all is well in the universe, and shit like that. Anyway, I’ve pretty much felt fabulous all day–no sinus junk, more energy.

I can’t tell you how exciting this is.

I’m attributing my health’s upswing to a number of things. First, there’s a probiotic that saved the day last year when I had a three-month-long sinus infection, so I’ve been hitting that twice a day (by swabbing it up my nose) since I woke up sick Friday morning. For sinus infections, it’s seriously a miracle. Second, I’ve been taking Zicam, Airborne, and bone broth in order to support my immune system. Third, I’ve cleaned up my diet by eliminating or severely cutting back on wheat, dairy, soy, sugar, and alcohol. And not that any of this is fun (or tastes like chocolate cake), but I sure enjoy the results.

Despite feeling better, I’ve taken today easy. This afternoon I read for a couple hours, did my physical therapy exercises for my knee (I had surgery to repair my ACL last month), then took a nap. Then this evening Mom made dinner, and all of us watched the live(ish) version of the musical RENT on Fox. I say live(ish) because one of the actors, Brennin Hunt, apparently injured his foot during dress rehearsal yesterday, so most of tonight’s footage (no pun intended) was from a previously filmed dress rehearsal. Still, having an injured leg myself, I thought it was pretty cool that in tonight’s final scene (which was live), Brennin appeared not only in THE cast but also in A cast.

The show must go on!

While watching tonight’s show, I finished my very first knitting project. And whereas I wish I could tell you what it is, I can’t because it was just for practice. Still, I’m super proud of it, since it’s my first “thing,” and I didn’t drop any stitches. (Drop a stitch is knitting talk for fuck up.) Anyway, it occurred to me while I was working on this project that every stitch is important. Just drop one of those suckers, and the whole thing will be off. (I know, I dropped plenty of stitches initially and had to start all over.) Likewise, when it comes to healing, or even one’s life, everything you do counts. There’s no such thing as an insignificant action or day. Everything links together.

The idea of abundance has been on my mind today. This morning when I searched for visualization/relaxation material on my music subscription service, I noticed that one of my favorite authors, who previously had only one album on the service, now had fifty-two albums on the service. Holy crap. If I were to order just one of those albums on Amazon, it would cost eighteen dollars. That’s nearly a thousand dollars worth of material I have at my fingertips for free (or rather, for $9.99 a month). I don’t know, I guess I’m trying to see abundance where I didn’t see it before, to recognize that it doesn’t just come in dollars. It also comes in information, health, and time–time to read, time to rehabilitate and heal, and time to learn new skills.

Time to drop a stitch and start over again.

Drop a stitch and start over again. The show must go on. Recently I rewatched Bill Moyers’s interviews with Joseph Campbell, and my man Joe, while talking about facing your challenges with courage, said, “I think of grass, you know. Every two weeks a chap comes out with a lawn mower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say, ‘Well, for Pete’s sake, what’s the use?'” In other words, we all get knocked down, but the tendency of life is to get back up again. That’s something I’m learning by watching and experiencing my body healing, that it wants to try again, that it wants to find balance, and–more importantly–that it can if I’m willing to help it.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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Being scared isn’t always an invitation to run away. More often than not, it’s an invitation to grow a pair and run toward.

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