My life is very good right now. Spring has arrived, my Truck camper has returned. I’ve had a splendid weekend disconnected from the grid, cooking, eating, sleeping and reading. I’ve been with Laura who is a gem and the nutbar dog Madigan a terror in her company. It’s been domestic. Like the lives the men described who returned from the ‘front’, those sailors who on leave returned to their farms which competent wives ran. The pressure was off. I enjoyed the weekend. I imagined that this sense of contentment was somewhere in the future in some assisted living place. Aging was not necessarily lonely and a struggle with fear of being robbed but rather it could go easy. I long for easy. Despite the idea that the ‘easier, softer way, “ lacks the stoic romance of the fellow ‘strugglers’. Vigilance I can contend with. I really feel I must pay attention. The threats are ever there. I don’t feel protected in an AI way but rathe than I’m walking along with my hand held by Jesus. I will not be alone but I will still face challenges.
Challenge is a better word than struggle. I had visions younger. I had goals and drives and bridges to cross and mountains to climb. I see my friends with children and grandchildren being uplifted by their own presence in the future. I’m without children and it tells. I am feeling time running out and that there are children carrying on but I don’t feel the obligation or duty of a parent. I’m an accessory , not necessary.
I do good work but it’s waning. My wisdom increases but my reach has decreased. Looking back I see that the gp I was could have been contented and I could have have saved myself the ‘struggle’ of four more years of double specialty and sub speciality as well as special interest in trauma and head injury. I could have avoided forensics but I was curious. The challenge of understanding mental illness not only for the communication with the patient but as their advocate was a whole other domain of learning. I remember liking teaching but am glad I avoided that in this world of stupid folk being ‘offended’, the euphemism of blame. I am at a time where I’m reducing my sense of accountability and responsibility. I felt so so long it was all on me and I had to achieve the desired goal. I stopped the hallucinations, I stopped the suicide. It’s as my fault and my job. I was the little boy holding him thumb in the hole in the dike. But now I’m increasingly self centred. The thought of dying does that.
I’m caring for myself. Speaking with a friend they were surprised I was taking lunch breaks as they remembered me working always through lunch, late into the evening, leaving the office or hospital past seven and being at work in the weekends. With the governments all out attack on the middle class, taxation and condemnation, I don’t know it gained me at all personally to work so hard and diligently. My tax dollars went to criminals and tyrants. What little was left over I paid dearly in health.
But I sailed. I danced. I loved. I muddled on with naivity and foolishness. I had high ideals and literally would work harder when abused. I was always believing it was my ‘duty’ and that I had somehow failed. Now I’m more ready to think it’s not the ‘fit’ or yes ‘I’ve failed’. Can we move on. The cost and waste of the institutions of blame and money are long overdue for reconstruction. I was told I had to perfect and if I wasn’t the evidence was right there. Those other places were human constructs with lots of psychological abuse but not the death and disease that attested to errors in the emergency room. I’m glad I’ve done so little damage with the trials errors of treatment in the most difficult of patients.
Working in addiction I was forever playing poker with brains full of chemicals in various states of excitation and withdrawal giving medication to people who lied routinely about what they were already on often themselves not knowing. I never knew their hands and yet played mine the best I could with surprising success knowing the casino always wins in the end. I ‘ve sevens a whole lot of death and disease but didn’t cause it directly myself.
Sins of omission came to fascinated me, covert and passive aggression, negligence and fate. I still wonder about the balance and how effort and prayer can ever so slightly alter trajectories. So many variables. Good intentions are all to so many but I specialized in outcome analysis. Now I’m more likely to follow protocols and do as I’m told because the punishment for doing the ‘right’ thing as opposed to what the authorities say is the ‘right’ thing is too overwhelming. I sacrificed so much for patients and others. Today I’m doing my bit. I’m not a hero. I’ve surrendered and at best am cleaning up.
If I was independently wealthy I’d probably just travel and write, play guitar more, maybe play chess. I’m paying for the travel aids I think I need ideally, outfitting for retirement but I have all I need right now. I’m ready to slip away. I’ve not cured cancer and there doesn’t seem time left for me to even write the great Canadian novel or reach Samadi or find Nirvana or levitate, or even get a spot on the mars flight or rule the world. I’ve lesser desires. I’d like to again lie in the sun and day dream. I did this weekend, put out the lawn chairs and make a fire with split logs and sit enjoying the wind wafting the wood smoke my way. I moved my chair to the right place so I only had wisps of smoke, just enough to bring back memories of Blue Lake, Minaki, family, Boy Scouts, Camp Steven’s, Church campus and later hippies. It really was just nostalgia. Memories of youth. Skinny dipping with beautiful girls or later lying under the full moon. The conditions had to be just right. A marvellous confluence. When bugs were not present so that love making on a beach or a mountain side or in a tent was idyllic. There have been countless moments of wonder and grace. I too often forget them as my mind today is drawn to the ‘struggle’s.
I’m the proverbial old general replaying the battles but it’s all just been water under the bridge with eddys and rapids. We’ll floating with the stream. It’s a good feeling.
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