Thank you God

Thursday morning. I ‘m over the hump in the week of work. I’ve survived seeing more people with body lice, the coughs and the sores of general practice.  I resisted scratching for a while but finally did.  The crawling starts at the back of the scalp.  It was only for a moment.   A brief moment of insanity.  A dissociative experience of the scores of scabies infested children I treated years ago.
When people yawn we tend to yawn with them.
 Now that’s over.  I loved the shower and the soap and was thankful again.  Thank you God for the simple blessings of hot water and soap.  Thank you for the warmth of my bed last night too.  The storm with rain and chill went on late but I was cuddled deep in down.  It was a good night Lord.  I’m truly blessed.  I dreamed fond dreams of friends.  My ‘stout’ friend and I felt obliged to do sit ups on waking in my dream. Now here I am and truly I should be doing sit ups to address the Christmas girth but no I’m sitting at another desk.  Desk jobs. Executive functions.
I miss the sea and wonder about trade wind sailing and the healthy daily exercise of moving with the boat and waves.  It’s enough that I’ve been hiking mountains on weekends in search of the elusive buck deer.  All week though I sit in my office. At night mentally exhausted I come home and watch tv and eat, good food, but more food than I really need.
I hear of people hibernating and complaining about that as I complain about egg nog.  The luxuries of affluence and mental illness.  Isolation is not an option elsewhere as it is in the decadent west. One learns loneliness in crowds not in empty rooms.
 Cooperation is  matter of global concern but here in my  locality it’s not a thing we speak of.  I’ll drive to work in a bit and run the gauntlet of men and women walking in the middle of the street playing suicide by commuter or just not caring.
I’m thankful for my car. My little Miata. I’m thankful for the ITunes University and the ability to listen to lectures coming to and from work. This week it's been history, philosophy and theology.  Over the years, I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of medical lectures.  For decades I  religiously ordered weekly audiotapes that I played wherever I drove, thereby staying abreast of family medicine and internal medicine while practicing my own speciality.  Then it was pod casts.  I miss the mini cassettes I got from the Medical Library on loan.  The CD’s I used were mostly for talks on  addiction. Thank you God for my new book, Psychiatry and Addiction.  It was a few years coming.
  The years pass. The retooling of an old mind for the new tasks.  I’m a constant learning machine.  I enjoyed reading physics yesterday, hearing the words of Max Planck once again. Reading the scientist Madame Curie was fun too.  Maybe one day I'll have the time to read Louis Pasteur again.  I read these greats first a quarter century ago.  They were dead by then. The "new" sciences were called new long after those who’d created them had passed. It makes me wonder what the "new" science is today. It will only become clear after we’re dead.  Life is movement. Creation is creating.  Im in the thick of it today.  Living in the present.
Richard Rohr has been good to read. My morning meditation often with Emmett Fox. I'm looking forward to hearing the Bach Cantatas again.
 I’m looking forward too to Turkey.  More churches, more art and mosques this time.  I’ll see architecture and people and have a taste of history and the world will be a little closer.  I’d set out to bicycle through Istanbul in the 70’s but the mountain passes were closed early by snow so we’d headed south to Morrocco.  Now I’m doing a leg of an ancient journey.
There’s porridge and coffee and yoghurt to eat.  Then I’ll shower and dress. I don’t have to shave.  I’ve a regular Santa Claus beard for the season.  Gilbert has his little bear coat too.  Thank you Lord for family and friends. Thank you for all your blessings. Help me do the next right thing. Help me help others. Thy will be done, not my will.