Our language tends to favor a binary (on/off or 1/0) version of events. Life is good/bad, the sky is clear/overcast, people are heroes/villains, decisions are right/wrong, play a game and you’re a winner/loser, and in our final hour we may well turn out to be saved/damned. If you used traditional wedding vows to get hitched then you got married for the polar opposites of better or worse, sickness and health, richness and poorness.
These ‘neat’ distinctions make it easier to follow who’s who on television and decide whether to pack an umbrella when we head out the front door.
In reality, however, life is not so black/white – it’s 100 shades of grey (and yes, I did meet your expectations, and doubled it!). Life is ambiguous. As well as being awake/asleep there are also day-dreamers and sleep-walkers.
In the same way, our health can’t really be summarized as neatly as sick/well. There’s 100 distinctions in between.
I have chronic migraine, but some days are better/worse than others. Moreover, sometimes I have other issues going on at the same time (I recently hurt my arm lifting something too heavy, and I’ve had a dodgy hip for years due to a lifetime of scoliosis placing too much pressure on one joint). My head might be fine, in other words, but the rest of me is falling apart! Alternatively, everything is functioning fine… until lunchtime, and then life unexpectedly turns upside down. And that’s just today. When tomorrow comes… well, who knows, tomorrow will be whatever tomorrow will be.
I suspect that it is unhelpful if you think of your health and happiness in terms of an on/off switch where you feel well/unwell or joyful/sad. Aiming for an isolated experience that acts as some sort of pinnacle of positivity, and then not always achieving that extreme (because it’s a tad unrealistic, let’s be honest), is a bit of a mood-killer.
Instead, I recommend placing yourself on a spectrum (like the picture below). It takes the pressure off when you think of your health as a sort of sliding scale that you move up and down on. Recognizing that you exist ‘somewhere’ on the (weirdly-colored) stretchy-blob that exists between great/terrible, is more realistic and a lot more manageable.
Here’s hoping that today, tomorrow, and forever, you can move yourself closer and closer towards the green-smiley-face end of the spectrum. But here’s to also recognizing that at any given moment, because you’re human, you’re probably more likely to be feeling green/red/browny-orange!
Take care, Linda x
PS – In another one of those weird moments of synchronicity that the universe keeps sending me at the moment, as I was putting the finishing touches on this post, a fellow blogger, Chris from Switzerland (“Born under the sign of the snake“), sent me a link to a website for people with chronic conditions. The name of the site is an embrace of EXACTLY what I’m talking about above: “UNFIXED: not fixed but far from broken”. The site includes a variety of material, that I would suggest, recognizes life lived in the grey-browny-orange zone. As they write on their homepage: “People love fixer-upper stories, miracle cures and answers but many wake up each day without any of these. Our world needs more models for how to live a meaningful, unfixed life – a life liberated from fixed notions of how we must feel in order to live fully. Unfixed humans may be in pain but they are learning to integrate it into a larger definition of themselves.” Wow! Talk about feeling seen!
You can read more here: unfixed (unfixedmedia.com).
Thanks for the link, Chris!
PPS – a quick shout out to all of you who “pushed the button” on Tuesday’s fishy-doorbell post – YOU GUYS ROCK! In less than 48 hours we got past 759-claps (what I picked as an impossible stretch-goal!). You are all SUPERSTARS – and quite frankly, I don’t care whether it’s because you have some strange compulsion or you genuinely care about holistic healing – we got there as a team – so GO TEAM!
The Mindful Migraine 
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