Health thoughts

 One of my all-time favourite writers is Oliver Sacks. I'm not sure what his exact designation should be — was he a neurologist or a neurosurgeon? Something of that sort. I think he was a physician, so let's say a neurologist then.

He wrote a series of books about different aspects of neurological disturbance and health, which are so vividly and engagingly written they read like novels. A superb writer, with a compassionate and curious mind.

There's something he said — I noted it down decades ago, and had to dig around to find it — that has always stayed with me. This was with reference to severe mental illness:

I believe that though one can be 'beside oneself' or 'lose oneself' for years on end, the self itself is still present, always present, intact, entire— however withdrawn or buried it may be.

He extends this to physical illness also — though I am fairly persuade by the view that mental illness is physical illness, as much as the condition of the body can equally be affected by state of mind — saying:

I think the ravages of physical and mental disease are both superficial; that there is something unfathomably deep beyond their reach...

[These two quotations are both taken from the extensive footnote 13 to page 277 of his book Awakenings]

The last five years I've been ill, doctors all puzzled and no help forthcoming, so I've been on a patient quest to restore health through simple and naturopathic means, and had a significant degree of success but never got all the way there (so far; I haven't given up).

Something that interests me about it is that occasionally (it happened this morning) I get a flash of how I used to be when I was well. And when that happens, what becomes apparent is that there's a whole version of me with the illness just pasted on top. It's like drawing back a curtain or a cover. Underneath there is suppleness and vitality and an unquenchable happiness. It's all still there, waiting; I just have to work on lifting away the slime mould of oppression sitting over the top of it.

This also gives me a different insight into death; I presume the logical extension of these thoughts is that at the end of our time here we walk through the doorway into the world of light and, as we go, we drop the cloak of sickness and disability, it just falls from us because it doesn't really belong to us, it was never really part of us — it's circumstantial, not proper to who we really are.

I don't know this, I'm only speculating. but it feels right.