Some thoughts on health & recovery from writers

[cafe_bustelo]

I've been writing these down here and there. Here are a few:

"For years I had been unhappy, consciously & deliberately... I isolated myself more & more, undertook less & less & lent myself to a crescendo of disparagement of others & myself. But in all that there was nothing that struck me as morbid ... It was not until that way of living, or rather negation of living, developed such terrifying physical symptoms that it could no longer be pursued, that I became aware of anything morbid in myself."

- Samuel Beckett (who according to his letters recovered "with great reluctance" from various skin conditions/pelvic pain etc)

"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered."

- Aldous Huxley

"Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more."

- C.S. Lewis

 

[Cactusflower]

@cafe_bustelo , I had a friend write something very similar today.
She wrote that she is the ambassador of complaints. If there was the highest award for being a complainer, she'd have two of them
She does not invalidate her complaints - most of them where justified. It's just that she lived them. Lived in them, let them all rule her mind and they stole her joy and purpose.
She's learned that these complaints are really only just thoughts and that you don't have to live only in your head - that your body is there to be lived in too and that the life we've been given is so that we can eek out at least a little joy from time to time.
My friend never suffered from chronic pain, but she was crippled by a chronically negative mindset. She has changed her job, her place of living, focuses on family instead of people who were never very kind or caring of her not out of spite, but out of self-love.

 

[cafe_bustelo]

@cafe_bustelo
She's learned that these complaints are really only just thoughts and that you don't have to live only in your head - that your body is there to be lived in too and that the life we've been given is so that we can eek out at least a little joy from time to time.

Wow, that is an amazing bit of advice. Totally resonates with me; I have always very much lived in my head and didn't know it was possible to do otherwise, I thought that's just how I am.

I am trying to see it as a blessing (or fortunate at least) that I am going through this now, relatively early in my life, because I know that if I'd continued the way I was going I would have continued living with the chronically negative mindset forever and my world would have just kept shrinking.

 

[JanAtheCPA]

These are awesome finds, @cafe_bustelo! It's a great reminder that the human condition is universal across all the dimensions of location, culture, and time. Please keep adding to them!