Here’s To Happier Thoughts

Blog 2315 – 02.24.2022

The the answer to the old question when faced with an overwhelming difficulty or task, “How does one eat and elephant?” is, “Why, one bite at a time, of course.” The Apostle Paul in one of his wiser more inspired moments wrote, “Seeing as we are encompassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with patience the race that is set before us.”

The word translated patience in the King James Version of 1611, is actually better interpreted “endurance.” Patience, perseverance, and endurance are in this instance synonyms.

Patience (different spelling than patients) is important not just to doctors and nurses, but to all of us. My beloved wife’s life has these last two weeks been filled with doctors and nurses and her scattered and confusing thoughts have I am sure more than tried her patience and theirs. And as well those of us who know and love her. My wife, as long as I have known her has been one to over-think things and to worry about everything. I did indeed after several tries find, as the song says, “A girl just like the girl that married dear ole dad.” My dad used to say of my mom that if she did not have anything to worry about that she’d be worried about that. All who knew her agreed that assessment was not a joke, but true. Mom’s story ended sadly three years after my dad’s passing with her ending her own life by her own hand. It seems that patience, perseverance, and endurance were never my mom’s strong suit. I hope my wife’s story has a happier ending.

It is the goal of the doctors, nurses, and therapists at the behavioral hospital that my wife is currently at to help her with meds and therapy to get back to her baseline thinking and behavior. I have put a thought out, an intention, a prayer request, if you will, to my loving and infinite source, the Universe, that the doctors, nurses, and therapists are able to accomplish more than baseline and are able to get Linda past many of her worrisome thoughts to the happier one. We all have them, even the cup half empty and somebody stole my cup folks.

Day before yesterday I started watching, again from the beginning HBO’s long running and award winning series, The Sopranos. Tony’s therapists said of his mother that her negative view of everything poisoned all the relationships in her life and at the end of it none of them were much comfort to her or she to them. Or at least that was the gist of what I got out of what Dr. Melfi had to say to Tony about his Mom. I have often recalled Tony’s difficult mom saying to him. “Just stab me in the heart, it would not hurt me worse than you already have.”

People so hard on others I have found to most always be even harder on themselves, making their own lives, not only others, more difficult than they need to be. I have had some unkind words for the guilt religions, especially the big three Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but even they have some happier thoughts to share. One I particularly like is, “Always walk on the bright side of your life.” In the movie, As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson plays a man with more than his share of dark and troubling thoughts, still even at his worse he plays the “bright side of your life song” on the piano and sings it with style for a cute little dog that he has surprisingly learned to love. You can, even despite the old adage, teach even older dogs some new tricks.

We, everyone of us, all could stand to learn a few new tricks, for life can be at times quite tricky.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11grZyzlXA2tsJhwmYaM1t50waYTXBti6/view?usp=drivesdk

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