Random Rambling – Live with purpose before body fully betrays you

This is more of an unexpected post or my random rambling. As much as this website is about living beyond symptoms and really putting a positive spin to a life beyond the day to day pan and suffering of chronic illness. But this post is about how hard it is on a day to day basis. Some days you just manage your symptoms, you tell yourself, such is life, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But some days life is not all that easy. I try not to speak about it as much but I think today it is important to give a voice to this.

I recently heard from a friend of mine who got a stage 1 cancer diagnosis. I don’t want to go into the details of her life or her diagnosis. However, I do want to go into things I have often said over the last several months. I have said – “I just want to know that something fatal is happening to me” just so I can probably make peace with the lack of improvement in my life and accept that may be my life is never going to get better or may be I will never get answers.

I know I sound pessimistic, but it is not pessimism, there is a certain liberation in knowing that you cannot really control the outcome of this journey called life. I live in the US and right now is probably not the best time to be living in the US. But if you ask me, right now is probably not the best to be living in most parts of the world especially if you are an immigrant living in a foreign land. But if you have lived away from home for more than half your life, then what is home anyway? You are a foreigner everywhere and when you have chronic issues you have not much relief from, you perhaps are a foreigner in your own body.

But despite all this, one thing keeps me going is – Faith. Faith that god has a plan for me, and faith that ultimately whatever my destiny is, a relief from health issues or soon enough there will be a notification that not much time is there will come about. Because in either case, especially the latter, I will do something instead of waiting for relief. We spend far too much time thinking we have a lot of time and thinking we really have something we must achieve by continuing to work crazy hours like I meaninglessly do. What is the point of money if you don’t have time and health to enjoy it? What is the point of any of it, if you cannot spend your limited time with the people that love you the most?

So coming back to this friend with the diagnosis, believe it or not, she wanted me to continue to work on my health care side project which I started few months back. I had made some serious progress because I had a noble intention but the moment my intention got muddled in any form, whether it was money, or who I was trying to help using the project etc., I started losing interest and stopped focusing on the project. But reality of it all is that I don’t need to do it for money because I may or may not be here to enjoy the money. Besides, if money was the only reason I did anything I did in life, I would be somewhere else in life. I also didn’t start my side project for helping people with just mental health issues because it was a cool thing to do. I was doing it for patients like me who are clueless with the myriads of physical ailments and changes their body is dealing with. But somewhere I lost track of my path.

Anyway, to cut the rambling short, I always believe god speaks to me in various ways and lately god has been telling me to focus on my health and my purpose during the limited time that I have here, because if not for me atleast for others, making living beyond symptoms a reality is what I want to strive for.