Posts tagged ‘dying’
A Cultivator’s Diary Pt 6 (from my journals 2007)
February 11, 2007
I read an article by Melanie McFadyean about her grandfather, Herbert Guttman from Berlin, whose father started the Dresdner Bank. Guttman went from an 80 room villa in Berlin to homelessness in London in 1939, but his attitude was “Money lost, nothing lost. Sense of humour lost, everything lost“. This is the right attitude to have in your current situation, where you are starting to worry about how you can fund everything. But this will all work out. Have faith.
February 24
I hope my energy improves soon. It’s now almost two weeks since I got ill and I hate the feeling of low energy, low enthusiasm and tiredness. It’s no good for work or life.
February 25
When you get ill, you realise how dying will feel, and you sense how old you are. What if you never recovered from this tiredness? Illness leads to thoughts of death, of continual weakness increasing (or rather strength decreasing) so that an illness creates a new lower plateau of being which can never be overcome and increased in most old people (unless they are very healthy).
What if you were a smoker? What would this illness, which has thrown up so much phlegm and bouts of deep coughing, do to someone who smoked? It would really devastate them, possibly leaving them in that lowered state of energy and being in which the next virus or cold or even damp weather might hit them again and lower their energy even more. So one can see an illness acting on the results of another previous illness, leading to a lower resistance and an inclination to get yet another disease. And so we go on into old age, declining year by year until we are gone.
Is there a lesson for you in this illness? Perhaps this is how you have to learn compassion. To feel so weak and low yourself, and to know that this is how many elderly and ill people feel every day, without the possibility of ever getting better. Knowing this is how they feel, surely you can sympathise with their feelings of health, extend compassion towards them, and understand that they and you are the same, in both health and illness. Sometimes well, sometimes ill, but always the same shared feelings of mind and body.
Mark Forstater's Blog 