acceptance

"Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it." - Eckhart Tolle

We probably all come into this world with insufficiencies in small areas.  I think it's part of our mission to identify the ways in which life is letting us know what lessons we need to learn about those insufficiencies and to do our best to overcome them.  I have no doubt what life has tried to tell me, time and time again.  No one sums it up better than Eckhart Tolle in the quote above.

Oprah Winfrey is dead-on when she says that your life speaks to you, first, in whispers, and the longer you ignore the signs that change is needed, the louder the whispers grow.  Listen people, the last thing we need is life screaming at us!  Still, so many of us let things get out of control or go on for so long that we have no choice but to wake up when we're finally hit on the head by one of life's rocks. 

Learning to go with the flow instead of fighting it and accepting life by finding the good in every day is the message that my life, God, the universe has been sending me from day one.  As a child I worried about things beyond my control, as a teen I focused too much on body image or others' opinions and as a young mother diagnosed with a chronic illness, I temporarily became paralyzed by the thought of my own mortality.  Each time I conquered my concerns about whatever it was eating away at me and I was able to see the situation for what it was:  another opportunity to accept.

So now, another health setback has left me reeling in recent days.  It's nothing life-threatening, just scary and blanketing me with a total loss of control (note the theme here.)  For those of you following, my ongoing struggle to control frequent migraine headaches has become a more complicated battle with the diagnosis of "low threshold for seizure."  Having never had a seizure, this is hard to grasp onto.  But grasp I did and ingested the first few months of brain chemistry modifying chemicals, even though I hated to add another pill to my sometimes daunting ulcerative colitis treatment regime. 

Following a second EEG last week, I've had no improvement whatsoever.  My dosage now increased; I'll be retested in six weeks.  I've heard terms like "probable seizure disorder" and "additional meds" and "left temporal lobe sharps", too much for my liking.  I dread the increased fatigue that makes exercise a near impossibility and the occasional effect on my short term memory.

But I can't deny one other thing:  yet another chance for me to accept what life is giving me and move through it.  No matter what the severity of our circumstance, the only thing that matters is right now and the good we can take from this moment.  And acting as if we have chosen this experience, no matter what it is, allows us to take ownership of it and grab the reigns of our life with more drive and direction then ever before.

To avoid the risk of louder life screams, I accept.  Ever a vigilant advocate for finding good doctors and playing a major role in our own healthcare, this doesn't mean I won't question, research and implement lifestyle changes that will, hopefully, eventually, get me off all these medicines. 

So, I have chosen this thing that life has offered.  I accept it.  And I move on.