Getting to the Root

Dear Reader,

It is 2:21 a.m., and I cannot sleep, so I blog. I should have been in Eugene with Beverly, sleeping at Beth and Jerry's house in anticipation of a day of hiking and art, were I not ill.

My illness has six layers.

1) Infection. The colloidal silver turned that around within a couple days, and the infection is nearly gone now.

2) Inflammation. So now the color of the congestion is gone but the coughing continues. I must deal with this layer next.

3) Weakness. Battling this thing is always exhausting. After I beat it, I will still need to rest and recover my strength. It was brought on by weakening myself with a marathon twenty-four hour patching session that came on the heels of a month of nonstop work.

4) Poor physical condition. I get sick because I sacrifice my health maintenance, especially exercise, for work. This has to stop.

5) Stress. This is why I can't sleep. I have known for four months what I need to do to fix what's currently most broken in my life, to drive down the stress in my life, but because it is an emotionally difficult step for me to take I put it off and am now suffering the consequences.

6) Attachment. After four years of investing my heart and mind and time and money and energy and spirit and identity into something, it's hard to let it go, even if it is making me sick. I keep wanting to find the right argument to convince, to perform the right miracle to earn enough trust, but these are losing battles. As Jerry says, you cannot convince someone who does not want to be convinced, and you cannot teach values to adults, especially those who mistakenly believe they already have those values. It is far easier (though by no means easy) to find people who already share your values, and in that regard I have been very very lucky, yet still I have continued fighting a futile battle to be understood by and convince the others.

I may be an extraordinarily slow learner--and that is not false humility but the voice of bitter experience--but my great virtue is that sooner or later I do learn, and then I fold the lesson into my very soul and change everything about myself to take it into account. Here are a convergence of lessons pointing to the root of my problem. Wake up, says Heraclitus, from your sleepwalking dream and see things for what they really are. It's time, says the Christian, to exercise some long overdue wisdom and accept this thing I cannot change. A little less attachment, suggests the Buddha, for a lot more serenity.

Yes. I see. I will.

Yours truly,
Rick