Is this how you want to spend your life?

by **banned** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:02 pm

This doesn't have to do with any of the topics we usually discuss here--deep politics, bizarro current events, UFOs, etc. It has more to do with us, the discussants. Bear with me a minute. If what I'm saying doesn't resonate with you, feel free to stop reading. I'd have put this in the parlour, but hardly anybody ever goes there <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/frown.gif ALT=":("> . The last couple of days have brought an unpleasant situation I've been dealing with for over a year to a head...legal matter. In amassing my witness statements, of a random group of my friends and acquaintances, I have gotten the following stories (paraphrased): 1. Semi-retired 60 year old female social worker now doing massage therapy: "I'm a mess due to anniversary reaction over my husband and daughter's deaths a few years ago, and just started Chapter 13 bankruptcy, with a $500 a month payment for 5 years. My sister and mother are mad I don't work enough, I do all I can handle. I'm over 250 pounds from 'comfort eating' and may have to have knee surgery soon. My four grown sons each have problems they won't take my advice about but when their way flops they want me to pick up the pieces." 2. 59 year old unemployed female floral designer, now working as part time gardener due to depressed state of the floral business; diabetic with eye problems from it. "My mother's dying, my dad's not helping because he secretly wants her to die, my New Age sister is in denial and my brother is ineffectual, so even though my mother favored them all our lives, now I'm the one stuck caring for her. Because this is Silicon Valley, I'm living in a dumpy studio with an Alzheimer's landlady but I pay 600 bucks, and lately I barely make rent each month." 3. 48 year old female SRA survivor with MPD, husband quit a good job 2 years ago in a snit and has failed to find a way to be self employed. He's quit or been fired from so many temp jobs none of the agencies want him. They just finished Chapter 7 bankruptcy. "My landlord just called [on the 27th] to say my husband didn't pay the October rent, and if we don't pay it AND November on the first they will start eviction proceedings." Now, my life is in a pickle too, but when I heard this stuff, I felt like Paris fucking Hilton. I'm single, no debts, small but regular income, modest lifestyle with minimal expenses, I have no children and my parents died 2 decades ago so as my age-mates (I'm 53) are caught between their kids and their disintegrating parents, I have 2 cats and a goldfish to worry about besides moi-meme. Of course, for all of us, the world is fast going to hell in a handbasket. OK, to get to the point. It seems to me my friends got caught in a trap of frantically trying to stay afloat so that they could frantically try to stay afloat so they could.... See, not one of them is doing anything like what they want to do, and none are getting any younger. #1 is laden with a big house full of years of stuff, overgrown adolescent kids, sad memories, is lonely and addicted to junk food. What she WANTS is to have an RV and toodle around, giving massages, seeing the country, with her dogs and cats. #2 is paying a fortune compared to what she's getting for it--in most of the country $600/month rent would buy her posh digs. She loathes her mother, her father is an alcoholic who let the mother abuse her. She's never been close to her brother or sister. What she WANTS is to live in a small town, work in a neighborhood florist where she knows her customers, do a little landscape design/gardening on the side, have nothing whatsoever to do with her parents or sibs. #3 is stuck with a spoiled boy-man who not only doesn't help her with her problems, he creates problems. She just wants to heal from her horrific childhood in a secure atmosphere where she can concentrate on that while someone reliable handles the practicalities. She CAN do that herself--she did for many years--but it kept her from giving recovery her full time focus. Now, what is stopping these people from living the lives they want? It isn't "the world's a mess", "George Bush sucks," bird flu...sure, high prices and disappearing safety nets and environmental destruction affect everyone, you can't live in a bubble. But INSOFAR as you can control some things, why not control them? Now, you may disagree with my diagnosis, but here's what hit me as I thought about these unhappy lives of people with so much potential (all are smart, talented and competent.) What's killing their spirits is...The American Dream. Somebody told #1 that keeping that house is her first priority. It's full of memories and clutter, she wouldn't have needed Chapter 13 if she'd sold it and paid her debts and bought that RV or even a smaller house in a small town. Someone also told her she had to be an 'involved' mother and grandmother instead of saying "I raised ya, you're 40 plus, take it from here. Somebody told #2 that spending your fifties chained to parents who treated you like a sack of crap in a dress for 49 of those years is the way it's supposed to be done. Somebody told #3 that marriage is a good thing, it's bad to be alone...even when when she was alone she had control of her life, no calls about "Chucklebutt didn't pay the rent." Now, most of my friends now happen to be women, but I could have picked three male friends...one is 58, a banker originally from England, his company has gotten so high pressure it's cut throat, he hates it. He went back to England a few months ago and was completely happy in Oxford, thought how he might like to move there and work in a bookstore. But everyone tells him "You can't quit the bank to be a bookstore clerk, are you mad?" No, he's sane when he talks like that, but that's now how the male career trajectory should go. Another guy is the same age, lost his high tech job 2 years ago and can't find another. The thing is, he hated his techie jobs, his real passion is music. A third is much younger, a talented actor who is now studying medical sciences because 'everybody says' it's too hard to make it as an actor (even though people do all the time, including people with far less talent than he has.) I think ESPECIALLY if the world grows darker and suckier, we all need to ask ourselves, if our time on this planet is limited (as it always is, and for fiftyesque people, we are closer to the end than the beginning), how ought we to spend it? This is not by any means an original musing. Tolstoy presented it dramatically in his novella "The Death of Ivan Ilych*" where his eponymous protagonist realizes as he dies that he never really lived, just fit himself into other peoples' templates and functioned. If one day we're going to be blown away by a terrorist bomb real or false flag, floated away by a hurricane flood, squashed by an earthquake, poisoned by environmental toxins, and practically speaking while any one of us can have an impact in some area of society to work for improvement but none can singlehandedly "fix" much of anything let alone set it all right....do we want our last thought to be "Goddamnit, I should have bought that RV/told Mom she's a narcissistic monster and I don't care if she dies/got a divorce/followed my frickin' bliss not what's 'marketable' today that might not be tomorrow"? Let me close with Ivan as he faces his death. "It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend. "But if that is so," he said to himself, "and i am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it — what then?" He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself — all that for which he had lived — and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death. " PS I'm going in next week to check to see if my cancer is still in remission. Perhaps that is what really has prompted this line of inquiry. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/eyes.gif ALT=":rolleyes"> ------ * If you haven't read it the entire text is online at: <a href="http://www.classicallibrary.org/tolstoy/ivan/">www.classicallibrary.org/tolstoy/ivan/</a>

by **marykmusic** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:27 pm

It's all about choices. That is our Free Will in action. Doing things because others tell us it's "the right thing to do" is OUR choice, not theirs. NOT making a decision is actually a form of choice known as "decision-by-indecision." Ya makes yer choices and ya takes yer chances" is how it works. My life these days is the result of choices I have already made. I continue the decision-making process every dany, every hour, every minute. You will choose whether to get cancer again, by the many small choices that add up to a positive or negative outcome. Please let it be positive. --MaryK

by **israelirealities** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:34 pm

I hope you are healthy, you don't need cancer. Its a good question. First, as you felt lucky compared to your friends' problems, they should do the same, compared to...say...Rowandans who are now searching for weeds to fill a bloated tummy of a hunger striken child...( who was also a victim of a medical experiments by pfizer, and now suffers from a rare viral infection eating up his brains.(just kidding, that's not fair, but sometimes it works for me). Think also how millions of people will now trade everything they own and have to just live where all these people you describe live. I have been on this issue lately, with lapses into suicidal ideation occasionally, which then allows me to go on (I plan the thing, replay the scene a few times, feel really good about dying, and then I don't need to actually do it anymore, for the next two weeks). life is suffering said the Buddha...but really I think in most cases of non rowandans, the problems lies with wrong choices. I just realized taht I fucked up my life badly, with a series of mistakes, that I was just an inch from death to me and my family, a year ago. (political mistakes, that's our "poison" in this region, it can be deadly). This made me stop, as people write about cancer doing the same for them, and making me THINK about my life, in the past and getting the full picture of my inner self, and the places I fucked up badly because of spiritual defaults (fear, pessimism, lack of trust in myself, lack of trust in "god" or "life", not following heart but fear, being manipulated by assholes I should have known by now, and so forth.) It all stood there like an indictment and hopeless character failures exacerbated by a really bad environment (Israel in general is a Karma booster, and a hellish place, in the sense that everyone around you is very intent on aggravating one's existing weaknesses. Forget support, feedback, gentle guidance...). And now I am at this limbo state, thinking OK now if I want to live, it has to differenct from now on, WITH ME< namely, my focus should be on the inner happening in the sense of constantly seeing where I relapse. Being more assertive with your inner self, I think that's part one. like "This is what i want, this is what I don't want" clarity and focus, no wishy washy. I think then there s more chance of really living your own life, not someone else's, but that will not make trouble go away. The reality of money problems, bad family, bad spouses, disease, that's always gonna be there. I am trying to keep this alive with me, but usually I don't succeed for long continuous periods. Its just the luggage of the past is heavy. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=israelirealities@rigorousintuition>israelirealities</A> at: 10/28/05 3:40 pm

by **banned** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:40 pm

...about anyone "choosing" cancer is, well, New Age crapola. Everyone from my support group is now dead. Not one of them did a damn thing to cause their cancer, nor did they choose to die. Many fought hard to live but some rogue cells fought harder. (Ironically thus killing themselves with their host.) I'm nasty, I wish cancer on all the people who think that, so they can see how true it isn't. Sorry maryk...hot button with me. On the other hand...I AM open to the possibility that making bad life choices has a suppressive effect on the immune system that makes a person prey to a variety of illnesses. Which particular illness depends on inherited constitutional factors plus environmental exposure. While being 100% into the life you're living is no guarantee of health, not being 100% into it, or being 100% not into it, is almost a guarantee of illness. I think what I was trying to get at was that behind the choices we make as individuals are social templates that define which choices are wise and which foolish. Dumping a house in an upper middle class burb while property values are still going up is 'foolish', except in keeping the house she may sit in it, get to 300 pounds, keel over of a heart attack or her bad knee will give out on the staircase and what was the frickin' point? In the RV zipping around seeing things she's always wanted to see--visiting her son at the Tibetan monastery in the AZ desert, seeing the sun set over the Pacific--she might slim down and bloom like that desert in the spring. The financially 'prudent' move may mean she'll make her last payment on Chapter 13 just in time to cark it. These people to me give off a smell, not literal, it's an aura of...you can look at their lives and see all the way down the road to the end, years of Same Shit, Different Day, till they need Depends or are carted off to the "Memory Challenged Community." Ha. Some days I wish I could move into the latter myself...mental pause sucks.

by **banned** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:42 pm

That suitcase full of regrets, missed opportunities and broken dreams weighs a ton. I guess that's why it surprises me that most people don't just SET THE BASTARD DOWN! and boogie.

by **jenz** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 6:35 pm

banned, sorry, nothing to say to your all to clear eyed analysis of the 3 friends sit. and its echoes with many of us. but hope the cancer stays off. a doc. who treats trauma induced madness with vit. therapy reports that on using (massive doses ) a woman's cancer went into recession. google orthomolecular if interested. sounds quacky I know, but not necessarily. also do be positive for yourself. there are cancers which obligingly just go, so I'm typing this with all fingers crossed.

by **israelirealities** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 6:42 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>a doc. who treats trauma induced madness with vit. therapy<hr></blockquote> can you send links on that ?

by **banned** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 1:02 am

...please send any more details! Thanks for the crossed everything!

by **LibertyorDeath** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 1:45 am

I can say with Confidence The goldfish won't last. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> To each their own I work 3 days a week & my SO works 2 I do computer tech work also but that's on & off. We live comfortably with 2 amazing kids both under 5 years old. We spend most of our free time enjoying them helping & watching them become who they are. We could both work 5 days a week spend more $ on crap we don't really need but we would rather be semi-retired in our early 40's because there's no guarantee on tomorrow and our kids will be grown and making their own lives before we know it so to each their own. Cheers

by **banned** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 1:50 am

...in September. Goldfish have a lifespan of up to 10 years. He's a shubunkin, which is actually more koi-like, he'd be a foot long if I had a bigger tank. He really needs a 20 gallon jobby like they have at the local Chinese restaurant. Alas, those fishies sometimes end up in somebody's soup.

by **LibertyorDeath** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 2:10 am

10 years !! Yeah but that's fish years right. LOL Hope he makes it to a bakers dozen.

by **banned** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 2:35 am

...or "fillet" around him <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/happy.gif ALT=":D"> One day a friend of mine came in and said "Hey I got a two for one on these frozen fish sticks, want one?" I said you mean TOFU sticks don't you? Do fish have ears? When I was about 5 I won a goldfish at a carnival and he only lasted a day or two before he went belly up. I was so traumatized it took me 48 years to get another one. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/eek.gif ALT=":eek">

by **Homeless Halo** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 2:56 am

fish do not have ears. they have things that are not entirely unlike ears. and they can feel vibrations through the water(in the tank) this way from you're talking very easily. So they can hear you. It is however, very unlikely that a fish could ever understand anything you said to it. There was, I must admit there was an ant once, who gesticulated towards me in such a meaningful fashion that I had the distinct impression he was trying to tell me something-- so, I'd not be worried about hurting its feelings, but you never know. Cheers. SHCR

by **pugzleyca3** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 3:11 am

What a great post, banned! You really hit it perfectly. I know I have mentioned this extract on the board before, but please check out the Samento herb for your cancer. I don't have cancer and I don't know what kind you have, but it shrinks tumors and helps the immune system tremendously. Well, I say I don't have cancer, but I think I may have been on the verge of skin cancer or may already have it. I hate drs. so I never go unless I am bleeding or have a broken bone. I have these weird tumors from too much sun on my arms and legs, just a few here and there. Just big enough where you could see them and feel them sticking above the skin. Well, the Samento people said that it could shrink tumors in 2 weeks. I said horseshit, nothing can do that, short of... what? Nothing. Well, my tumor things are so small now that you cannot feel them, the skin is still discolored compared to my normal skin and when I run my fingers across them, they are even with my normal skin. It is for all types of cancers, not just tumors. It's an amazing herb and I will not bore you with my testimonial of how great this stuff is. I've been on it since 10/10/05. You can look it up and read about it and it is truly fascinating. You sound like such a wonderfully smart, caring person that I believe the world would be a much worse place without you in it. So stick around as long as you can. Regarding your post, I can tell you this, when people are in their death beds, most don't waste time regretting what they did do, they regret what they didn't do. I have always done everything and anything I wanted to do. Nothing holds me back. Not the lack of education people say you need to do a certain job, not lack of experience and certainly not lack of the guts to fall on my face or my ass, whichever the case might be. The only thing I might regret when I go is not falling on my ass or my face more times than I did, for those times are the ones in which I learned the most about myself and life.

by **jenz** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 4:31 am

<a href="http://www.islandnet.com/~hoffer/">www.islandnet.com/~hoffer/</a> sorry not my computer, can't do the clever pasting links in stuff. this one is directly about vits/cancer gist of story on trauma (which is wot brought me to this item originally) is that hoffer was a psych in canada, but before that a bio chemist. so on admitting patients he first ran blood urine tests. if you've ever accompanied anyone to the psych emergency room you will know that this is not standard - they usually get a chemical club first, and no-one looks for physical signs. apparently he noticed that patients in psychosis tended to have very low levels in blood of B3, and some other abnormalities. this rang bells with deficiency disease of pellagra (why those nice people at Kelloggs add niacin to their cornflakes) hope I''m not mangling the brain chemistry too much, but apparently when your body makes adrenalin in response to stress, there is another chemical which pops along and zaps it, when you are out of danger, and this is made with the aid of B3. If no zapper, adrenaline becomes adrenochrome - dabblers in consciousness 'expansion' will know this one. so there is a logic to it al. the cancer discovery happened by chance when treating the deficiency of the psych patients. all this is also interesting in an RI kind of way, because of the attempts to legislate out of existence our right to obtain vits and dose ourselves with them. it doubtless irritates the pharmas like fun that they are out of patent and cheap. media keep releasing scare stories - latest was overuse of vits can be bad for osteoporosis. and also squeaky clean advice on diet like eat 5 fruits a day. (link with obesity question here). However (link with maternal poverty question), basic job seekers allowance is around 50 quid a week, and fruit costs 50 to 60 p per piece ie about 20 quid a week per person to folow this. you can get a bottle of multi vits and minerals for about 3 quid, which lasts a month. Oh yes, results of hoffers ideas kind of confirmed by research giving prisoners multi vits - reduction in measurable incidence of violence. lots of stuff on increased IQs also. still crossing everything for you banned. 2 friends I have who beat cancer, one by classic treatment, other something very new agey happened, a kind of mind over matter experiment.

Is this how you want to spend your life?

Is this how you want to spend your life?

Re: Is this how you want to spend your life?

Re: this is going to be a "ladies thread" right ?

Sorry, maryk, that New Age crapola...

IR, you said it.

vit c

Re: vit c

Yes jenz...

Re: Is this how you want to spend your life?

My goldfish is tough, he just had his second birthday...

Re: My goldfish is tough, he just had his second birthday..

Thanks, but we don't say words like "bake"...

goldfish

Re: Is this how you want to spend your life?

vits

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