Category Archives: slice of life

Pre-diabetes and shoes

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The glucose solution, in a manner of speaking.

The glucose tolerance test today delivered a mildly unpleasant surprise. The starting value was 6.1, which is already too high. (Ought to be 6.0 or lower.) Two hours after the glucose meal, the value was still 9.3, which is smack in the middle of IGT, Impaired Glucose Tolerance, also called Glucose Intolerance (sounds like a worse case, but actually used interchangeably), also called pre-diabetes because something like 10% of IGT cases progress to diabetes each year.

Now, I have repeatedly told my doctor about my two diabetic parents, so he was probably less surprised than I. Back in 2005 I tested my blood sugar several times and it was below any warning lines. So anyway, I blame my shoes!

See, if I had replaced my jogging shoes two weeks ago, I would probably not have gotten a sinew sheath inflammation (or that’s what it feels like … my family has a predisposition to get those, it seems) and so I would still have been walking (with some jogging when needed to keep the heart rate up) for an hour each day. And so my liver would probably have some room to swoop up extra glucose for topping up its glycogen reserves. That would probably have been enough to lower the blood sugar to 7.8 mmol/l, or at least very nearly so. So, blame it all on the shoes. ^_^

That said, this is not exactly bad news. I don’t have high blood pressure, I have barely elevated values of fat in the blood stream (triglycerides and cholesterol), my pulse is slow, and I don’t have sleep problems by human standards. Health personnel used to envy me, perhaps not so much now with this new development.

But seriously, having more sugar in the blood? That just means I can eat less sugar and still be as active as before. I have to look for new types of food that contain less sugar AND still very little fat (since fat makes me ill) and don’t taste like coarse grass or worse.  Uhm, I am sure I will find something. I did find low-fat foods in 2005, after all, it just took me a couple months or so to change my habits and then the rest of the year for my digestion to rebuild for the change. For a beginning, I have bought a small bag of pressed oats, the old Norse and Scottish breakfast cereal. OK, not sure exactly how old, but I am pretty sure oats breakfast predates Kelloggs.  Mixing this with my fruit yogurt makes it last longer till I grow hungry again. It has lot of healthy fiber and slow carbs.

I am pretty upbeat about this, although I am sure my doctor will (figuratively) beat me up over it. I mean, having more fuel than necessary does not seem like a problem. “There is a way with the sausage that is too long” as the Norwegian proverb loosely says. Meaning you can just cut off some of it. I can do that with the food as well now that I know it is too much.

***

Oh, and the shoes. I have been thinking about buying new ones, off and on, for weeks at least. But I never found an opportunity to get away from work for long enough. (The shop that sells them in the city takes plenty of time with each customer and nearly always has customers. People seem to accept that a specialty shop requires waiting for half an hour or two.) So I did not take that time until I was already in so much pain that the alternative might have been to stay home from work for that.

This fits disturbingly with something I read by Ryuho Okawa yesterday, that there are people who love illness. They just steer straight ahead, ignoring the warning signs, until they get sick. Then they want sympathy, or feel that that they can’t be blamed. Well, I don’t expect sympathy for this. I made a mistake waiting this long, and I plan to make less mistakes in the future, if any. Or at least not the same mistakes as this time…

***

Speaking of making the same mistakes over and over, there is a small house in the countryside for rent a few miles from here, still in the Mandal area. For 3/4 the price I pay here, but 30-40 minutes walk to the bus, judging from the map. Which would been a GOOD thing, except I just have shown myself incapable of ensuring that I can even walk…

Foot

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My right foot was almost completely healed this morning. Unfortunately, on my return home from work it hurt worse than ever. The top of my right foot and front of the calf (leg, not animal) hurt very much like my wrist used to do when I was typing a lot at work some years ago. I assure you however, I have not been typing with my toes. Instead, I suspect my shoes. Unfortunately it is the last pair so I will have to take some time off from work to buy new ones. I think that is better than not being able to go to work at all!

Tomorrow is the lab appointment. For that, I have to stay in the clinic for at least 2 hours. (Glucose tolerance test.)  If the doctor has time, I will mention the foot again, this time with feeling. ^_^

Not going to look for a spiritual explanation of my foot problem before I have tried new shoes. The voice in my heart seems to concur with this. It certainly does not protest.

My splendid isolation?

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Actually I am very similar to Rika Dobashi here, except I have no one to tell me “You don’t really rely on others, everything you do is decided by yourself”. Well, nobody outside my own heart, at least.

If you came to this site by googling for the phrase “splendid isolation”, as I just did, you should probably go back to Wikipedia or some reliable history sites. I had no idea that this phrase had ever been used before until a few minutes ago, and the voice in my head used it in an ironic meaning. I think it was ironic, at least.

See, I had something like a small panic attack this afternoon. This is rare indeed at this stretch of my life, thankfully. I had napped a little in my chair and felt kind of sick and weird, and way too cold for the glowing hot room. Then I got kind of sick. But anyway, sickness happens to all sometimes, so that is not the point. Rather, at the same time a sense of dread came over me, and a feeling that my life was a failure and would end as such.

I thought back, over the many long years in which I have felt content, have woken up in the morning grateful for a new day, the many years of not so ecstatic or intense but still happiness. Thinking back, there has to the best of my knowledge not been a single moment in my life in which I have wanted to end it, and only minutes at most, in my teens, where I at least halfway wanted it to end. Apart from that, it has been decades of enjoying this life I have been given. Oh, I did not enjoy my job for most of the time, until just a couple years ago. But I accepted it and I certainly enjoyed the life it made possible. Looking back at my life, I found it hard to agree that it was a failure, that it was wasted, when I had lived decades of quiet joy.

But at the same time, I reprimanded myself. (It is somewhat hard here to keep track of who is I and who is myself, more about that in a moment.) I had been happy, sure, but had I made others happy?  Occasionally and more or less by accident perhaps:  Back when I still was in the Christian Church, I had friends by the simple virtue of us all walking in the Light, but now that we are not in contact anymore (and they probably assume I don’t walk in the Light anymore, since I don’t attend the Church meetings), that opportunity has closed. And I have no skill in making friends. Not that I need those friends in order to feel loved or accepted. I need them in order to give those kind of feelings to others, to make others feel the love I now have for them only in the most abstract sense.

Around this point was when one of the voices in my heart, I am not sure if it was me or myself or some kind of spirit guide or whatever lives in there, used the phrase “splendid isolation” to describe the last decade or so.  Sure I have had a splendid time, but very rarely did that rub off on others.

For some reason, one of the voices in my heart (and evidently not me, since I have never heard it before) found the phrase humorous, to the point where I eventually had to look it up to see what meaning it had beyond the obvious.

Evidently the era of Splendid Isolation was at the last height of the British empire, when it stood astride the world like a colossus. At the time, it had no allies or friends to support it, but neither did it need them.  Albeit just barely not. Being alone in the world is precarious even for an empire, as I am sure the most recent contender has also begun to find out.

There is also a song with the title “Splendid Isolation” which is closer to the meaning in which I (or possibly myself) used it, but I have never heard it before. I am listening to it right now and neither the lyrics nor the music sounds familiar at all.

Then why do I recognize the phrase? Well, I really did not. It is one of those rare glimpses of there being someone else in min mindscape who knows things I have never heard of. You probably won’t see it unless you believe it, but of course I have the Presence, whether it is a tendril of God or a guardian or guiding angel or spirit. I am not a theologian, luckily for all involved probably.

But you see, this is exactly where the splendor come from and exactly why the isolation does not bother me. I think it bothers the Presence more, actually. Maybe I did not get all this blessing just to live a happy life in splendid isolation, but to share some of that splendor with others. I just have no idea where to begin, except for my work.  And this journal, but I am not sure I can give you hope and courage and make you feel loved by telling you about my panic attacks and conversations with my heart. Well, not unless you know me already. In that case, it may amuse you a little, I hope.

 

 

 

Harmless doctor visit

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Next stop: The glucose syrup diet! Kind of.

Let us talk about my doctor visit! It is always interesting to hear old people talk about their health, is it not? ^_^

Today was the appointment for my second doctor visit this year. (The trip in between was only to the lab.) Today’s appointment was originally for checking my prostate gland, but as I have already mentioned, in the meantime I found another explanation for that particular problem. I explained this to my doctor right away. He did not seem particularly disappointed, strangely enough, despite not getting the opportunity to study my rear end.

It seems the doctor had already concluded from my questionnaire that it was probably not a prostate problem. He seems to have thought of diabetes, as well he should since I have repeatedly told him that both of my parents developed this condition. However, the glucose content in my blood sample was within normal range, albeit higher than perfect. This is really the same as when I talked with him two years ago or so. He seems to be waiting for me to develop glucose intolerance, but that is unlikely to happen if my foot recovers within a reasonable time so I can keep walking everywhere. As long as you keep moving about, it is very hard to develop metabolic syndrome, even if you are bit overweight. And I’m barely even that, although what little fat I have seems to have gathered around my guts as I have grown older.

That said, I seem to live on the threshold of that condition, like my parents. If something happens to make me stop using my body actively for a while, it may well break out. Light send that doesn’t happen anytime soon.

My amount of bad cholesterol is also higher than ideal, despite my low-fat diet. Then again, the ideal may be a bit extreme. The doctor fished out a book illustrating the levels of heart disease risk at various combinations of age, smoking or not, blood pressure and cholesterol. Evidently to his surprise, when we looked at it, I fell squarely within the dark green area, the negligible chance of heart infarct. (Of course, fate may still intervene, but so may meteors from outer space.) So he slightly sheepishly added: “But if you would start smoking, you would be at risk!” Yeah, I’ll consider that if I ever feel suicidal and want bad breath thrown in.

So as to not waste a perfectly good patient by sending me home happy, he decided to attack the diabetes angle instead. I got another lab appointment, this time for Tuesday. I am supposed to not eat anything after 9PM on Monday, then at 8:30 in the morning to show up at the lab and drink a hefty beaker of concentrated glucose solution. Then I am to wait quietly for two hours and they will measure my blood sugar again. His theory is that it will go down more slowly than it should, thus betraying my glucose intolerance which will manifest within a year.

Of course, this is pretty close to my standard workday breakfast, which consists of two cups of chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce, and (until recently) two glasses of Pepsi with 10% cane sugar. I have recently replaced the Pepsi with chocolate milk though. Lifestyle change for healthy living!  I haven’t told my doctor. The blood sample was also analyzed for long-term blood sugar, where sugar molecules bind to hemoglobin. Evidently that was within acceptable range too, despite the sugar pudding with sugar sauce and sugar liquid. So I am pretty optimistic about that test.

And of course, the opportunity to tell the poor nurses: “Foolish mortals! You have provided me with a source of unimaginable energy! Yes… I can feel its power coursing through my veins!”

Seriously though – one cup of glucose after 12 hours of fasting? It is likely to leave me begging for another serving. I usually eat sugars and starches from morning till night. What else should I eat when I can’t eat fat? Broccoli? Perhaps one day – with modern technology, I may be able to work from the bathroom…

No more long walks

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That small gray stripe in the far background is a glimpse of a sand road I would sometimes walk. Picture taken during my last long walk in that area.

It may be a coincidence. Actually, according to the scientific worldview, everything is coincidence. You worldview may vary… Actually, I hope so, for your sanity. Although I suppose you can go too far in the other direction as well. (I am thinking of you, New Age people!)

I have been taking a walk of approximately one hour almost every day for the last few weeks. But when I came home from work on Monday, my right foot was hurting. I walked for half an hour that evening anyway, but I’m not sure that was a good idea. Since then, my foot has been hurting so badly that I can’t seriously consider taking long walks anymore. Even walking from the bus station to my workplace hurts now.

Yes, Monday was the day my landlord told me he had sold the house. That was after I came home from work, and my foot had already hurt for several hours.

If this turns out to be a long lasting problem, I will have to find some other way to exercise. But in that case it would be pretty amusing if the house was sold at the exact same time that I could no longer use the feature I most loved about it.

Anyway, I hope I get the chance to talk to the doctor tomorrow about this. My appointment is about something entirely different, so maybe the best I can hope for is to get a new appointment, and even that may not be before the summer vacation. And in any case, it is quite possible – even likely – that my foot will heal naturally over time. After all, my body has had a tendency to do just that for the last 52 years… Although it won’t continue that way forever, of course, and perhaps I needed a reminder of  impermanence in the midst of all my happiness, which I was so eager to display to the whole world.

 

A change of plans

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If you feel like you are pathetic, then do something about it! (From an anime NOT by Happy Science, strangely enough. It is one of their basic principles, thus the happiness.)

I lived in the original Chaos Node for over 20 years, and it grew really packed with stuff, because I was a packrat born and bred. It is probably in my genes, it was certainly in my environment. Be that as it may, I threw away several car loads full of stuff when I moved, in addition to carrying books and magazines to the used book store for two months or so.

Four years later I moved again, and once again I threw away stuff, albeit less than last time. In each of these cases, I only kept what I was sure I was going to use, what I was sure I was going to miss if I did not bring it with me.

After a year and a half, most of it is still not used: Most of the remaining books and comic books not read again, most of the movies not watched again (in all fairness, almost all of them are Smallville episodes), most of the clothes not worn, and most of the old broken computers neither repaired nor used for spare parts, most of the remaining computer games not played. Even though I threw away almost everything I was not sure I would need…

If they are actually going to destroy the house without moving in first, I should ask the landlord if it is OK to just leave things here.  I suppose they are going to torch the place.  I am thinking of leaving about half of my stuff in that case.

Failing that, I intend to bring it all with me to the new apartment, except for what I throw in the garbage bin  Tuesday in two weeks (Wednesday morning is garbage day). Then give away what I can, throw away the rest, except enough to furnish one living room and one bedroom.  And then move to a smaller, cheaper place. There is no point in spending most of my after-tax income on rent if it is not awesome. And I suspect this was my last awesome place ever.

If I find a house in the countryside I can rent later in my life, I have no problem with leaving 2/3 or even 3/4 of it empty. Who does that hurt? Who will scream out in pain if rooms stand empty? But if I don’t, I will try to rent small apartments at a much lower cost. And have so little stuff that I can move quickly and cheaply.

I don’t want to compete with families anymore.  Dragging with me all this stuff is insane: It is cheaper to buy new clothes and electronics when they wear out, than to bring with me a decade’s worth of spares and have to rent a whole house to keep them, or else live in clutter. Or both.

***

The universe agrees. After writing today’s entry, but not yet telling anyone, I found this link posted by an online friend (the article itself is by a complete stranger though, but you have to wonder about the synchronicity here!)

Please, make yourself uncomfortable.

 

Goodbye Riverview

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Here today, gone this summer.

When I rented this place, it was for 5 years minimum. The owner intended to give it to one of his own children when they grew up, which is still a long way off. But things have changed. A relative of his wife and close friend of the family has returned from China and really wanted to build a new house on this spot.  (It is close so children can run over to each other at any time of the day or year.) And he was willing to pay a lot for it. So the landlord sold the house to him.  They are going to tear it down and would like me to get out of here as soon as feasible. I’m moving on the 7th, Light willing. Two and a half weeks from now.

At least this all happened without any threats for bashing my kneecaps in or anything. On the contrary, the landlord offered me a basement apartment of roughly the same size in Mandal, the nearest large town, in an old quiet part of town with little traffic. I went and looked at it. It is OK, and probably 100 years younger than this house. There’s lots and lots of wardrobe space. And it is bound to be a lot cheaper to heat during winter. Plus it is a few minutes’ walk from the bus station, where buses go every half hour instead of twice a day.

So, it is not a complete disaster. But neither is it a cause for joy. I have dreamed of living far from the crime and grime of the city, surrounded once more by green fields, farms, hills and flowing water, like in my childhood (when I, shame to say, did not know to appreciate it). I have lived that dream here. But dreams end. Life itself, after all, is one such dream from which we are going to wake up.  This is much smaller than that.

And yes, I feel a bit betrayed. But not very much. If I cannot forgive such a betrayal and bless them from my heart, I would not be worthy of ever uttering the name of my hero and savior, Jesus Christ, who prayed for those who killed him. This is pretty far from that (unless I have to help carry the washing machine again, in which case I can make no guarantee of my survival.)

I understand that the future of a relative (especially of the wife) is more important than a legally binding contract with a stranger. I don’t want to make more trouble for them than necessary. But even so, starting today I am looking for some other place to move to, eventually. Either cheaper than now, or out in the countryside again. Most people want to pay extra for living in the middle of town, but for me it is the other way around.

One thing that is still sinking in:  There won’t be stone left on stone of the old house. I am not sure that does not hurt me  more than simply having to leave. I know I complained of how cold it was during winter, but it is still a home. Here have generations grown up and lived. People lived here before electricity came to Norway, probably huddling around the wood stove on cold winter evenings, wearing thick clothes. People lived within these walls the summer when Norway became an independent nation for the first time since the Middle Ages. People lived here when the first cars began to roll on the roads, but not on the roads here, which were only suited for horse wagons.  Some family lived here during the harsh year of the Nazi occupation, when the future of the world itself, much less the country, was uncertain.  They lived here when spring came and the King returned to a free Norway once again. The previous owners lived here when the big, straight road was built a minute’s walk from here, straight through the valley.

Now I live here. I am the last human these walls will ever protect, the last of my race to seek shelter under this roof.  It is old, and beginning to grow frail, but it has served for a long, long time. It has, in fact, done nothing else but serve.  For a few more days shall I avail me of its protection, of its familiarity, Light willing. Then it will be empty again, but this time no new humans will come to live here. One day soon it will be razed to the ground, to give room to a new, large, modern house. Only memories will remain, and a few pictures.

It is an irony that I cannot hold back my tears on behalf of a house, even though I have buried two grandparents and one parent without shedding a tear. But then again, I doubt houses go to heaven when they die.  Of course, many people doubt that about humans too. Perhaps I too will doubt when my time comes.

But moving one more time will hopefully not be the end of me. It will be the end of Riverview though.  (And the pretty pictures.)

***

Well, at least now I know why these lines from an old hymn in Norwegian have been on my mind over and over these last few days. I noticed them but did not realize what they predicted, of course. The Light knows the future, but cannot reveal it fully to one such as me.

To my Lord my soul has said: You are my dwelling, my castle. He who has entered a covenant with you, sings praises in the midst of all sorrow.

All dwellings on Earth and probably even those in Heaven are temporary. Only the One is forever.  All that I had, all that I am, has always belonged to God and no one else. “God, you have been a dwelling for us from generation to generation.” Let it so be, world without end.

 

 

Oops – sleeping may be it

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The human body is full of mysteries. Especially down there. But today was a slightly different form of pleasant surprise from what the picture might imply to the younger reader.

So on Thursday I had my blood drawn to test for the proteins that signal a probable prostate cancer. The reason was the sudden onset of one particular symptom of enlarged prostate.

For unrelated reasons, I went to bed at 2AM and slept til 9:30 AM today. The thing is, I did not have to get up to urinate, and when I finally got up, there was almost no liquid. That’s when I realized: This is when I used to sleep for the last 15+ years!

Well, perhaps not exactly, but around 2 to 9. When I lived closer to the city, I could do this and still squeeze in a 90% job before the 5PM bus home. Or very nearly so. When I moved further away, the next bus in to the city would not be get me to the office until nearly 11, so I would have to get up early and take the previous bus now and then.  Three such “long” (8 hours) days over the course of two weeks would be enough.  (Norwegians are very productive – we work short hours and have long vacations and still get everything done. ^_^)

The thing is, I did not actually work 8 hour days as often as that, with the predictable result that I slowly built up a large mound of “time debt”, “undertime” or whatever you will call it. Sometime this winter I started paying it down.

With the help of LifeFlow delta brainwave entrainment, I can go to sleep three hours earlier than before, get up early  and still not be particularly sleepy during the day. In fact, if I wake up a couple times in the night, this makes me LESS sleepy in the morning, because even a minute awake is enough to start delta “music” again.  (I don’t keep it playing all night so as to not mess with the brain’s natural 90-minute sleep cycle too much, and to not develop immunity. A couple times a night seems fine though.)

Now the whole 90% job grew out of the fact that I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, a minority condition where the body’s clock is nor reset by external stimuli in the normal way. There are divergent opinions on whether it can be cured, or even whether it should be cured. Arguably it needs to be cured to approximately the same degree that black skin needs to be cured: The only serious problems from this inheritable condition are those imposed by society.

In fact, if the minority with DSPS were allowed to live the way they were created, we would have less problems with rush hours and billions of dollars would not be lost to people sitting in cars and raging when they could have been at work.  But let us just let that slide for now. Humans are stupid, as we all know from direct observation of those around us. Especially in traffic, I suppose.

Anyway, my brain is happy with brainwave entrainment. But evidently my kidneys have no respect for it. They probably continue to work hard for the first three hours of the night, every night. (And then more slowly in the morning, as before.) Which means that the sudden onset of the nightly bathroom run did probably not come from any changes down there, but from the changes in my bedtime when I first started to try to work in my undertime, and later switched to working full time.

This, dear reader, is why I almost never go to the doctor. Because when I do, the local clinic usually concludes that I am healthier than those who work there, and the only things I achieve is to  a) embarrass myself, and b) add to my hypochondria score card.  There have only been a couple times in my adult life that a doctor visit has actually helped in any way. OK, perhaps four times.

Oh well. I understand in America, the land of extreme health expenses, it is customary for the better off to take these blood tests even if they have no symptoms.  (And even if the sum of the biopsies and the treatments are approximately as lethal as the cancer, statistically speaking.)

Now, the big question is whether the kidneys will eventually decide to join the sleep rhythm of the brain, or whether I shall have this divergence for the rest of my working life. I have a feeling that if I live to my planned retirement at 75, I won’t have any long nights of continuous sleep even after that. But who knows.

***

Well, I suppose I no longer need to eat tomato and take long walks. Well, unless I want to decrease my “overall mortality” – the risk of dying from any random reason – by 40% by investing half an hour a day. As far as risk management goes, that seems a pretty good investment to me. On the other hand we could be fatalists and say that the day when you are fated to die, you die. That is certainly true. But that day seems to come a lot earlier for most fat and flabby people, in our part of the world at least.  (It’s a bit different in hunger-stricken areas, of course.  May you and I never need to save up fat for times like that.)

Besides, I have started to kind of like both the spaghetti sauce and the long walks. I walked for an hour today again, in rain that was so light it was almost fog. Then went home and ate pasta with tomato sauce. I rather enjoyed them both, truth to tell. Although my “things to write” memory runs full before even half an hour of walking…

Now to decide whether to call off that doctor appointment. I presumably won’t benefit from it in any way; but on the other hand, if I cancel it, the doctor will never know if he later runs into a case like this again.

Busy week

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By my standards at least, we’ve had a busy week at work. We have been rolling out the first wave of new technology locally. Mistakes were made, and not by us. ^_^ Problems with central servers affected performance at just the same time, so it would seem to the random observer as if the problems were connected. That was probably not the case. I also have a start on the next new technology, but I find that I am still not able to help much with it. There are parts that are handled centrally that I don’t have access to. Still, I enjoy having more to do, for now. One day I even forgot that the workday was ending, until my bus had gone. I did not come home until around 10. ^_^

I am pleased that the weather has been cool, after the couple days of feverish heat that I wrote about. So it has been fine weather for walking, I don’t need to bring water to avoid overheating.  It has even rained a bit.

 

Work and the new me

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It has been said that love is the source of all energy and vitality in life. Not to mention work and school.

I fear I may have written more entries of that type, but I have found at least two: “Work sucks” from the year 2000 and “Head against the wall” from 2003. I am pretty sure there was at least one more over the first ten years of my journal. In these I complained that work was God’s punishment and that I would just as well live in chronic pain on disability pension rather than work until I was 65.

What the hell was wrong with me?

As usual when I seem to be using profanity, I actually mean it in its original, religious meaning. In religious language, we could say that my attitude was one that comes from Hell and leads to Hell.

When reading the biblical account in Genesis, it may certainly looked like God is angry and wants to put the hurt on Adam and Eve. But can that really be true? In some families here on earth, the main difference between a toddler and his father seems to be that the father is physically stronger. But is God, the heavenly Father, the Creator of all and the original parent of the human spirit, really someone who looses his temper and decides to punish his small creations and their offspring for the foreseeable future?

It may have seemed reasonable to Israel at the time they received the Torah. They lived in a harsh world filled with senseless violence. A master would treat his slave harshly, and a father his child. So it may have made sense to read this story as if God flew into a rage and cursed his disobedient creation. But is that really so? Another perspective is that work was not part of the problem, but part of the solution.

In Heaven, there is no need to do any work you don’t want to. If you for some reason were to want anything, it would at once be there. And if you wanted to communicate with someone, you could do so instantly and fully, with no risk of misunderstanding. Your love would be clear for all to see. But in the 3-dimensional world on Earth, things are different. There are many wants that cannot be fulfilled, and we cannot just radiate our love telepathically. The combined solution to these two problems is work.

Through work, we can satisfy our own needs and at the same time those of others. In that regard, work can be compared to making love.  (Obviously we should not actually confuse the two, or strange things may happen in the workplace!) You may say that in marriage, you express your love by making love, but in society you express your love by work. (Of course, in either case this should not be the ONLY way you express your love! Or that’s what the voice in my heart says, I have not tried.)

So the problem, such as it is, is that we are not in Paradise, at least for the time being. Work is part of the solution.

***

I had an idea of this when I began to work around the age of 20. But then I saw injustice, how some people got away with crime and others were persecuted for no reason, and how difficult it was to know the truth. And as Jesus Christ had warned before he left this Earth: “Because injustice gains the upper hand, love will become cold among the majority.” This happened to me, but so slowly that I did not notice. I became disenchanted and forgot to love. Work, which should have been an exchange of love from Heaven to the world through me, and of gratitude back toward God or the Light, became instead a dark stretch, eight hours lost from the days of my life.

As can be seen from the darkest of the two articles I wrote back then, I knew that something was terribly wrong and my subconscious tried to warn me. But I just could not get what it was saying. I was looking in the wrong direction.  This was to last for several years.

To my shame, I did not realize my error until I read Master Ryuho Okawa’s book The Laws of Happiness.  By the standards of today, I have generally been a happy man for many years. But there was this big dark spot in my life. Reading his introduction to improving work performance, he almost casually mentioned that you will rarely get good at your work unless you can say: “This is what I was born to, this is the way I can give back to society for all the love I have received.” Suddenly, like when the sun rises on a clear morning, the darkness of ignorance fled from my mind and I saw how terribly I had been mistaken.

Looking back over the years, I saw how my work had steadily changed, with little or no input from me, from the things I found difficult to the things I was  interested in. By now, I had a job where I could work with things that interested me and spend my time helping other people all day long, never troubling them or causing conflict. It was amazing. My whole sector of the economy, and society itself, had been changed as if specifically to give me the best possible opportunity to enjoy my job and do my best. Life had changed for thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people, as if they were all being shifted around for my benefit. It was as if God had spoken to his angels and told them to do whatever it took to make me happy with my work, even if they needed to transform society itself.

I was shocked. Seeing the truth, I was  horrified at my own behavior. I realized that I had made a great mistake and blasphemed against the Light. I regretted deeply and decided there and then to change my ways completely.

Actually, that was not so easy. I had made bad habits and due to my lack of effort I was way behind my coworkers. Furthermore, no one thought they could rely on me. I had become one of those middle-aged men which people consider to be half retired, coming to work only to get their pay, who cannot be relied on to get anything done. So it was a bit of an uphill struggle, and it still is.  But I keep at it. I also have certain physical limitations, but for the most part I can work around that, doing other things instead.

Starting in May, I have begun working 100%, after many years of working part time. I have received permission to work from home on those days when I am too sick to commute but not too sick to think. I also brought up with my boss a new technology which I am competent with, and which it just so happens that our clients are about to start using. I politely asked that I be allowed to use this technology at work so as to be better able to help our clients. At first, my request was turned down; but a few days ago our boss sent a mail to the whole team saying that we could and ought to acquire this new technology.

So I love my work, and I love my boss. ^_^ (Very platonically, of course!) I have no idea how long I will be allowed to live and work, but I am living each day as if it is not my last, planning for a life of working far into the future. If the Light wills otherwise, there is probably a reason for that. Despite my many mistakes and weaknesses, I have begun to really hope that I will one day come home to the Realm of Light, my eternal home. But until then, my job is an opportunity to bring that Realm of Light down into this world, that it may shine for all who are in the house. And if I fail, I will learn from it and become stronger, Light willing, until I become a blessing on legs or die trying.