If my health had always or even, mostly, been good I could probably have been the leader of the free world, apart from the slight difficulty of not wanting to be the leader of the free world. Who would? You’d never be free of other people’s troubles.
Currently, for a change, the worry is about someone else. It looks as if extensive tests for the OH today may have extensive results.
If the health of those around me had not been such a trouble in the last decade or so, I could happily have been not the leader of the free world but been free of responsibility for other people’s wellbeing.
It is hard work caring for the wellbeing of someone close who will not do it themselves.
There are many interesting ways you can be a trouble to your nearest and most annoyed. You can, for example, do what my mother did, you can get up and sit down expecting others to do all the work and consider sitting all day to be a luxury rather than a danger.
Many years ago when the jade princess was discovered, some investigation of the corpse, beautifully preserved in the wonderful jade burial suit, revealed that being given a lot of the best food and not having to walk but instead be carried in a palanquin was not the benefit it appeared to be. The corpse of the pampered lady had high cholesterol, diabetes and heart trouble and she was only fifty.
Another way you can be a trouble to your relatives is never to be there in the evenings, having rushed through dinner to get to the pub.
When I had the broken arms and later the abdominal surgery, coming to, in my bed, with a thirst, I crawled out on to the landing to shout for a glass of water. Having inched downstairs I reflected that I could have saved the energy needed for the shouting and put it into the crawling.
There are many things you can avoid in life. Work, responsibility and caring being three of them. What you cannot avoid is karma, the consequence of your repeated actions. Did you ever play Consequences, the parlour game where you wrote assorted sentences on a piece of paper, folded it and passed it on?
In case you didn’t, if you can find one other person to play it with, it goes like this:
Each write: one or two names, fold and pass on, write actions, fold and pass on, write a location, fold and pass on and as many qualifiers as you wish and the final sentence which starts ‘and the consequence was…’
Not only a metaphor for life, an easy introduction to karma.
Karma lite, if you like, and when practised in reality, even if you don’t.
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