I hope I am not trespassing on Sunray's discussion about Quality vs Quantity and dying young(er).
I have been wondering this for some time, even more since a member of my family passed away. It gave me a new "opportunity" for questioning what is Health, Life and Death and all of them combined.
In short, I almost feel that contemporay society and everyone of us puts a stigma on "being ill" and dying from a disease. As if disease was ....something shameful that only people who werent proper team-players and winners got and then, if they werent "positive" (ie: strong, and strong believers. I dont know what of.... but belonging to a way of thinking) enough to battle the illness, they "lost".
And we would remember them as "those" who "fell". Of course, not openly, but unconsciously, as deep down one shudders at the very thought of falling too. And then one quickly proceeds to search and find the "reasons" for the departed to have become victim of her/his fate. And if you think this is pure madness Im writing (well maybe you are right!), then consider the following:
Causes that can make the Shadow take control of your body and fate:
- not enough positive thinking. not enough smiling, giving to self-pity (for example self pity in some countries is almost natural, such as France! but in the UK/US, it is a crime. it is vile. one is expected to bite the bullet, have stiff upper lips and carry on, regardless) etc
- not being socially successful. Isolation makes one scared of "losing it". and people who dont have a very active social life can be suspected of being "strange". I find the Facebook social phenomenon interesting, many people have over 250 "friends". of course we know they are not real friends. but nevertheless.
- not being "active" enough: job and /or sports. Again, in the media beautiful successful people are Los Angeles products: healthy, pretty, tanned, and VERY active. On the go. I remember shuddering at the words a friend's boyfriend gave me on the phone...years ago. When I asked if my friend was home, he (cameraman always on a mission. actually, literally. Monday in Singapour, Wednesday in St Lucia, Friday in Berlin etc and often meeting many glamorous women) laughed and brushed such absurdity aside and said "No!! she is BUSY. she is a very busy woman". So suddenly my friend had become unreachable and I got the feeling that I should have clapped and emulated her. She had reached a mountain top. I was feeling uncomfortable living my unglamoroussly slow life. hardly 2 friends to see per week.
- then we think of food, and lifestyle habits like stress (being too busy!), smoking, living in a polluted or irradiated area etc etc. and genetics.
I came with questioning the idea of "long life" versus "short life" as my family started to pick at the "faults" or weaknesses that could have provoked such an early death. And food, lifestyle or place werent on the menu. Oh no. It was "yes but she was always a loner, wasnt she? never remarried". That shocked me as it sounded like harsh judgement at the wrong time (funerals!) but also started to peel the accepted notion of winning a Long Life award.
And so what? so what if one gets cancer and enters the next world before expected? why getting paranoid and deeply anxious WE too might come next on the list? Is the fear associated with disease and dying the glue that keeps society in its present order?...
Ive noticed around me that the best people went first. Of course i cant apply that to the world as serial killers and dictators dont all die young!
But what if it was all an illusion? a game, a way of thinking? you're a winner if you've got perfect teeth at 70, no wrinkles, are pleasant to look at, always have cracking jokes that translate you as full of energy (ie Life) and are tumour-free. SOD IT. makes me want to terrorize youthful innocents when I am 80 (if I "win"!) and walk on a nudist beach baring it all, proud of my anti-looks.:p I'll get tattoos too, i'll actually wait til I'm 70 to get tattoed all over! show them "the New Woman".
What if going to the other side...ok, let's get practical, dying was ok? what if...we were called or get duplicated elsewhere in the universe once we died here?
I know that sounds like an apology of "heaven is full of 4000 beautiful virgins and if you blow yourself up you'll access there first class". sorry for the extreme example but just illustrating that I am NOT advocating that heavens as in religions exist...just that there may be more to our stressfully healthy-conscious lives.
(have just remembered the name of this web site!)
Very briefly, Fadette, while I ponder a longer response to your thought provoking post, I'd like to say that in my belief system dying is OK. To quote Pink Floyd: 'I'm not scared of dying. Any time will do.' (And I speak as someone who looked death in the face 8 years ago when I was diagnosed with a disease which according to a site I found on the internet 'kills 50% of those diagnosed within 5 years.' Obviously I'm in the other 50% but at the time I didn't know that and I realised that I was going to have to walk my talk.
I also think that having a long life per se may not be all it's cracked up to be.
xxx
agree with you and cant wait for your usually very intelligent posts to give me even more feedback.
Hi Fadette
Let's all hope you live to 80+.
🙂 x
Hi Fadette
Let's all hope you live to 80+.
🙂 x
But why, Penny? Not wishing an early demise on Fadette of course:cool: but why should it be seen as a blanket 'good thing' to live to a 'ripe old age'? There are so many variables to be added into the equation, not least the stipulation that there's not much point in living to 80+ if you're going to be unlucky enough to develop senile dementia or Alzheimers. A long life just for the sake of it isn't much cop if you've lost your mental faculties along the way. Ditto the strength of your body. My heart always aches when I see old people (usually with no one to help them) inching their way to the shops, pain and difficulty etched into every movement. (Which is an appropriate place for me to remind all you young things out there to a) watch what you eat and b) take regular exercise!!;))
xxx
Hi Sunanda & Fadette
you're a winner if you've got perfect teeth at 70, no wrinkles, are pleasant to look at, always have cracking jokes that translate you as full of energy (ie Life) and are tumour-free. SOD IT. makes me want to terrorize youthful innocents when I am 80 (if I "win"!) and walk on a nudist beach baring it all, proud of my anti-looks.:p I'll get tattoos too, i'll actually wait til I'm 70 to get tattoed all over! show them "the New Woman".
So Fadette could fulfill her wishes.
🙂 x
and not sit in front of the computer for too long haha!
thank you Penny1, your comment goes to my heart. Of course I still think wanting a long and healthy life may still be a lie and a pressure to keep us in check by society.
It is a hard subject...who is fear-free not only in front of death (for it is abstract) but getting ill?...being looked at by society and family as statistic, THE case that shows what you mustnt do, the sad story..?
this has been bugging me more and more as I see a growing trend, even a school of thought that jumps onto un-empathic conclusions that seem, to me, make one feel guilty of their ills.
this has been bugging me more and more as I see a growing trend, even a school of thought that jumps onto un-empathic conclusions that seem, to me, make one feel guilty of their ills.
Is this, perhaps, because we think people have become ill in some cases through their own fault? I'm thinking of obesity related disease, lung cancer in a lifelong smoker, that sort of thing. Do we think people 'deserve what they get' when they don't treat their bodies properly?
Mind you, Fadette, I'm not sure I agree with you on this. I think the vast majority of people show sympathy and compassion in the face of someone else's sickness. Or is it just a facade?
Personally I have no fear of death but if I were going to spend time thinking about it - and I don't except when my thoughts are turned in that direction by threads like this! - I have a horror of being bedridden and/or disabled....Give me a quick death over a lingering illness any time.
And I'd like to add that I think 80 year olds have every right to parade on the nudist beaches!
(Reminds me of a joke card I saw once. Two elderly women were - let's say - on a beach when a naked old man streaks by. One of the women says 'What on earth was that?' and the other replies 'I don't know but it sure needed ironing!)
xxx
hahaha Sunanda!
I was going off the wall with my beauty terrorism fantasies because in the UK you're not too pressured by it (although some british female friends told me the opposite, they felt pressured to be thin etc) but in France and any mediterranean culture as a woman you constantly live under the harsh look of men, first, then women. You have to be beautiful (but look "natural". that what makes me rabbies-mad. the "natural" hypocrisy. on top of having to work on one's look to fit into male stereotypes one has to pretend that we just wake up every morning like this and never feel like cutting our unruly hair that reach our bottom and have never touched make up...) and young.
TV humour is always about filming rich over 45 years old women and smearing them with cruel moquery, comparing them to mumies etc. there is just no escape, if you accept wrinkles, you re not even visible anymore, but if you go for plastic surgery then you're an object of near hatred. It s all to do IMO with male gaze...
anyway, going off topic a bit.
When I said "making us feel guilty about having our ills" I wasnt refering to lifestyle-related illnesses. No, what I have in mind are ramdom serious and less serious illnesses.
I'll give an example from my recent personal experience although I had by then noticed the judgement-illness wave ...I hope I'll make sense as it is a bit late!
A reiki young woman came to my home for a reiki session...I wanted to experience reiki for I was curious, am about to get on a course, have had on and off digestive upsets, and also was doing a bit of market research for the future.
The lady was in her early twenties.
Right from the start she dug into my past and present personal life. unsollicited. head on psychotherapy. hadnt even had the time to explain about the IBS! she didnt even seem interested in my symptoms (where it used to hurt), she said "yeah yeah yeah" and questioned me further about my personal situation: job, emigration, relationships and especially past love and childhood.
I thought she was untactful and a bit intrusive, as I wasnt invinting her to dwelve into my mind. I told her at one stage that I couldnt confess her more than I had because I had just met her. She was unphased and proceeded to quizz me on colours.
When I said I didnt really like the colour Red (and dark blue as in overalls and uniforms. I just find the colour boring. however I love a blue sea and a blue sky) her eyes lit and she stopped me there. I was lying down on the couch. (yes she was doing the reiki while analysing me!). she asked me why. I told her as clothed Im not too fond of red, it annoys me, especially when French women wear a red half coat made of a typically french fabric, it makes them look like little girls, one just wanted to give them a red balloon. She was excited and without me providing anything about my childhood except that my parents were seperated from an early age she bursted "that's because you had a conflict with your mother! Red is for the mother link so here you are". I told her that even as a painter, red doesnt hold much depth for me, as opposed to greens and other shades, it stays on the surface, like a flashing light, but she was still going along the "conflict and anguish brought upon by your mother".
sigh.........basically every chakkra scanning was analysed in a fanciful interpretation of my supposed life choices. I hadnt told her anything about love relationships but she declared (judging I guess from the fact that there wasnt a man when she came into my flat) that I wanted to avoid commitment. That made me quite pissed off. sheer ignorance. I told her I d have loved commitment at one stage but then, like the colour theory, whatever I was telling her, I was guilty of my own mistakes and past miserable lives (because she was certain I had issues with past lives too 🙂 )and my arguing only served to prove her point: the more I disagreed, the more she was enjoying her self righteousness: my unconscious/conscious was speaking! you just couldnt win and I felt I was psycho analysed by a half educated and inexperienced (as in experienced from life) girl who had just discovered Freud and the mind-body link. It was totalitarian. Was like being Leonardo Di caprio in Shutter Island.
At one point it was so spacey I found myself calling my "angels" to protect me even though I dont believe in them while she was playing shaman and loosening all the invisible luggage around my waist! definitely an experience 🙂 (I am quite certain I can be a fantastic reiki etc therapist since meeting her. she was the exact opposite of what I call professional and pleasant).
One week later, I had forgotten about the nutcase when I received an email from her.
It was a very long page filled with scannings of book pages. At first I was puzzled then I saw her comments. Next to each body ailment like colon spasms or colitis, there was the author AND her interpretations: like an horoscope, there was everything one could hope to find in mental miseries: grief, anguish, narcissism, feeling hollow, jealousy, absolutely every negative emotion you could imagine.
I was angry. I replied to her giving her my piece of mind.
I think of these kinds of people when I talk about illness and judgements. Quite a few people are just convinced they have godly science and do mental anatomy on physically fragile people in a way that just make you feel like a total neurotic once they've stopped talking. Like you've brought it on yourself. you know, the saying "change your mind then the rest will follow".
Of course I know that in joy you dont really have the time to feel ill, but this is going to one extreme.
I just have enough of those people who think "they know" and lack basic empathy and tact.
By the way I am aware I have posted depressing threads lately and like someone said on another great thread, "words are energy", I am sorry for depressing anyone with ideas of bad health and death!
It teaches me a lot really. Will try to come back with happier things in the future.