“Never give up. Never surrender.”
-attributable to:
Leonidas of Sparta, Jael the wife of Heber, Alexander the Great, Queen Boudicca, Mary Magdalen, the Prophet Mohammed, Hildegaard of Bingen, Vlad the Impaler, Queen Isabel of Spain, Geronimo, Copernicus, Marie Curie, Winston Churchill, Aung Suun Kyi, Terry Pratchett, the 14th and Final Dalai Lama…
Rest and retreat, yes.
Pause for thought, please (unlike some of those listed above.)
Knowing when to acquire a sense of proportion, ideally (again, unlike some of those listed above.)
But… don’t give up. Don’t give your rightful self away.
It’s always been easy for me to be determined, but not easy to pick the right things to be determined about.
- In my 20’s, I wanted to save the world.
- In my 30’s, I was willing to work only on that part of it that wanted my saving.
- In most of my 40’s, I was dying — sometimes by inches, sometimes by yards — and couldn’t quite save myself.
- I’m 50; what a relief!
Given that trajectory, it’s no wonder that my priorities have shifted a little.
I figure that, as long as I have working pulse and respirations, I’ve got a job to do. (I suspect everyone does, but I could be wrong.) My particular job is to re-possess my physical self, and, given enough slack, help others to re-possess theirs.
Our bodies are not just machines, despite the inherent dis-inheritance proposed by Descartes (considering the body a separate entity from awareness), and the even more extreme model funded and fomented by a slightly misguided Hearst (who fell in love with interventionism, and drove the mechanical-problem-to-be-fixed model of medicine over the shifting-dysfunction-to-right-function model of medicine.)
Bodies are the media we experience life through, the means we have to respond with. Despite the relentlessly shallow concerns over appearance the media saturates our lives with, our fundamental experiences of life are not just seen. Life is an all-body experience.
Bodies are marvelously self-aware organisms on an enduring quest to care for and maintain themselves by communicating as effectively as possible within themselves, and responding as usefully as possible at every level — within the cells, between the cells, from cells to organs and back again — with the marvelously alert circuitry of the nervous system and the dazzlingly subtle chemical dance of the endocrine system drawing the whole show together.
That’s a bit more complex than just meat-sacks wrapped in hide.
I’ve been mulling the twined facts that my body is an amazingly tough, brilliantly adaptable organism, and at the same time, is an organism constantly under sieges both subtle and overwhelming. Yet it never stops trying to find a useful set of responses, it never stops signaling and listening.
It never gives up. It has never surrendered.
I admire that.
More mantras
Just for grits and shins, here are a few other things that I mutter to myself over and over.
- C’mon, you can do it.
- Motion is lotion.
- Use it or lose it.
- Change or die.
That’s quite a set, when I look at it laid out like that.
Not all of them are cheerful. Sorry.
They’re all thoroughly grounded in my reality, though, and they all have had something to do with my getting this far. They are hammers and screwdrivers in my mental toolkit of radical presence, pushing back on neuroplasticity, and not settling for what this disease would leave me.
Naturally, I say these things to myself in tones of firm, loving parental authority, since it’s all about re-re-plasticizing my brain, and those are the tones it responds to.
FTR, I’m sincerely glad it responds at all. When I was in nursing school, they told us adult brains were fixed for life. I doubted that from the start, and events eventually caught up with my skepticism. Brain plasticity FTW!