Last week has been tumultuous to say the least. My husband had to fly out of the country, I got sick with a facial tic and I was all by myself. Not having my husband around is bad enough, that I had to be sick and by myself was worse. I was very unhappy, scared, anxious and simply wanted to curl up in bed until it was time for me to travel to join him in Hong Kong.
Being unwell and being all by yourself without family around is hard. I felt alone and scared. I had little energy to do anything except get up and do my basic daily chores. But I had to see a specialist, go to my volunteer work on Monday. I wanted to give up.
Then I started to think. I have been volunteering as a hospice patient visit volunteer for just over a month. I see two patients for about an hour every week. I also spend time with one of my patients spouse. I started to think of them. I felt that I was like my patients in the hospice, minus of course the confirmed death within 6 months. I felt alone. I felt I was stuck in a body that was not making me feel good. I was inside my own house without any loved ones. I was also at the care of total strangers in medical care facilities.
But then I thought more. I tried to see what it must be like for my patients. They are in there late 80s, so very weak physically, they are in a nursing home removed from their familiar surroundings and their loved ones. There loved ones will visit them from time to time but they could not dictate when. They were in the care of strangers. Room mates of strangers. Stuck in weak, sick bodies. Perhaps like me I thought. But then again I realized, that I was not in my 80s and stuck in a body that is frail and unable to move. Yes I didn't have my loved one but I could walk out, drive any place that I wanted to, in case for entertainment, food or whatever. My faculties were well functioning.
I realized that I had very little to complain about. My feeling sorry for myself, could no longer be justified. So I got up and went to see them and later that day I also went to see the specialist.
I didn't feel elated at the end of the completion of these tasks, that I had found to be so very difficult in the previous day. But I wasn't feeling sorry for myself anymore. I was clam. That was good enough.
Thinking of my patients changed my perspective. I think we lack perspective for the majority of the time we live. We take things for granted. Our health, what we have, our comforts, people who love us and many other things which are really not that complicated. Then when we lose them, we complain about them. Instead, I realized that I needed to appreciate and feel a sense of gratitude for what I have and stop complaining about what I don't have. Because at the very moment I am complaining, there are many people in the world, who live just fine and make do with less things.
Why is it that we cannot gain perspective? I contemplated on this for quite sometime.
I felt that we lack a great deal of empathy for the general suffering that goes around. We live in our own little bubble. We usually think people who are rich and powerful live in bubbles. I don't think so. I think each one of has a bubble of our own. No matter what conditions we are in, the kind of people we deal with, whether we have comfort or not, each one of us has a bubble. Outside of that is all other things external. All our dramas, pain, happiness and the whole bag of it, happens inside of our own bubble. Therefore we feel it is ours only. There is a sense of why is this happening to me. Why is the world unfair to me? Why do I always have the rough end of the stick?
But what I realized is that in each bubble this unfolds. We just cannot get ourselves to look at the other bubble and recognize that what's happening inside mine is not that much different to what's happening in the bubble next to me. Therefore my suffering takes on this all important role. But if you were to look outside and see that the person next to you goes through similar issues, then yours will not become that important. But we humans are not engineered to do that.
I realized that's something we need to acquire. I think it's one of the most important acquisitions to be made, because it makes you understand that we are all alike in some way or another. That these huge barriers that we seem to erect between individuals, groups and societies is really not necessary.
I have also been watching the Kardashian show during it's last two seasons. I'm sure some people think they are privileged and lucky. But when you cut through their clothes, mansions, cars and expensive looking trips, they go through the same dramas, personal issues, unhappiness, confusions we all go through from time to time. I also realized that they are worse off than us, because they have to live under the scrutiny of so many people in the world. They also have to succumb to expectations of so many people in the world. So after watching this show for almost two seasons, I have come to see that their lives are not that different to mine, except that I have a great deal more freedom and choice than any one of them combined.
I saw the same conclusions, when it came to my hospice patients. I may not be certified by two doctors that I would die within the next six months. But then people die without the certifications of doctors everyday. My suffering was not that dissimilar to theirs, except that they had great many more barriers to their day to day living.
So, this perspective helped me to be less engrossed in my own issues. I became a little less selfish.
I think we become selfish because we are too engrossed in our own issues in our lives. We are the center of our universe and everything has to revolve around us to make our lives better. Well it never works like that, not for me, not for you and not for anyone, no matter how much we would like to believe. But when we live in our bubble things look and feel very different.
So it's important for us to step outside of ourselves. Understand where people are coming from. Not from your perspective but from the theirs. Then you learn to appreciate whatever little you may or may not have there is much to be grateful for and when we live in our little bubble, that gratitude is lost in our selfish desires and complains.
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