30 October 2008

loaded for bear (part one)

mono really limits your extracurricular activities - seriously limits them. simple things, like walking down the stairs to your apartment to go get the mail or take out the trash, wipe you out. with these restrictive limits (read here, "really only able to sit in one spot or sleep"), i am finding myself with a plethora of time to consume the hours with sleeping, reading, and thinking.

while these are things that i find in short supply during the entire course of my non-mono-infected life, two weeks of this sedentary life style is driving me i-n-s-a-n-e. however, i have gotten some reading done that i have wanted to do (though about an hour of even this low-level activity can drain me these days). i've noticed a theme as i've read various tomes covering a variety of themes and subjects is that everyone thinks they've got the silver bullet.

and one of the things that i've really come to believe is that there are no silver bullets.

don't get me wrong: there are lots of werewolves, vampires, and other assorted monsters and creeps in this world that a silver bullet would be just swell to have in the ol' revolver, but it just ain't so. as hard as it is to do, we need to have a varied arsenal at our command, a big toolbox in the shed, or whatever analogy you want to stick in there. maybe i'm spouting common knowledge here, but it seems like we're all looking to find the panacea that will cure all the ails in our own little worlds.

but that cure-all remains ellusive. and that ellusivity? it's permanent. you can't find it, because it's not there. but still we look, we seek, we toil. if only we can find that one way to answer it all ... and so we spend our energies trying to find a way to solve it all with the silver bullet.

now, my faith in a way is that silver bullet ... it provides absolute truth, a keel in the midst of a wildly raging sea, and practical ways of dealing with the insanity of life. but even my faith requires looking for ways of expressing it and living it and taking it to my hurting world in a different way everwhere i look.

and i think that's it ... we need to be willing to diversify our lives and our thinking and our applications and our ways of doing life. no silver bullets, but a quiver full of different arrows that can be used in a myriad of ways. (think i can stick in any more metaphors into this post?)

this is all quite abstract ... perhaps a bit more concrete in my next post. but hey ... i've got mono, so cut me some slack. geez. ;^)

peace - b