Counting Your Blessings

I don’t think I ever wanted to write this article. If you were to ever explain to someone that you have a disorder called IBS and that it is very disruptive to your life and causes a lot of pain, inevitably, someone is either going to SAY or THINK, ‘At least you don’t have cancer!’ or some such comparison. As we all know, this is not helpful. It’s apples and oranges, not having a life threatening illness does not make our struggle any easier or less important to us. I think we can probably all agree on this. However, lately someone I care about has come face to face with cancer. I am there to support her and so are many others…what I’m suggesting here today is not that our struggles aren’t real, but that perhaps sometimes we may lose sight of a larger picture.

Put things in perspective

To be told you only have several weeks or months to live is something that I do not want to experience. The mere thought of it makes me wonder how I would react. Would I have courage? Would I have a complete nervous breakdown? Both are a possibility. When your life is directly, imminently, irrevocably over (short of a miracle, I believe in miracles), from what I’ve witnessed the person affected seems to look at time in a much deeper way. I’ve seen the intense pain associated with disease, the havoc it wreaks on family and friends and the decisions that need to be made for when the person is no longer with us. This is as serious as it gets. I realize that it is part of life, but I think that’s what I’m getting to here. Regardless how painful our lives may be at times, regardless how pissed off we might be that we have this disorder, regardless how inconvenient and worrying…we still have our lives. We all know that perspective is important, but sometimes we may forget for just a little while. Seeing someone who is so sick that they may die, puts things in perspective. I hold these people in my thoughts during meditation and prayer and I thank them for their courage and the lessons to be learned.

Count your blessings

I just wanted to say today, let’s all just count our blessings; let’s look for the good stuff. I think with everything we have going on in our daily lives we forget to do that sometimes. Sometimes it takes something very, very serious and incredibly sad, to force us to dig deep and take a look at things in a different way. It doesn’t have to be the obvious either. We can look and see a family member who loves us or a friend and we know that they are a blessing. We can see the food on our table and the roof over our head and call them blessings. But, there are so many other things. A sunny Saturday, kids swimming in the pool, a walk on a mountain trail…so many things. I’m done with the hippy stuff…just try to remember. I'm trying.