sometimes 2+2 equals 5

When I got to college as a freshman I had no idea what I wanted to be when I "grew up".  I was a pre-med major at first, but I convinced myself I wasn't smart enough (or serious enough) to follow that hard path.  I ended up switching to Philosophy...but then I figured I wasn't smart enough to keep up with the intellectual-types that were career thinkers either.  I ended up with Psychology - a nice middle ground in my opinion.  It tied health and abstract-critical thought together.  What had inspired me about Philosophy was the question of the unknown, and how deep those intellectuals could delve into answering the unanswerable.  What inspired me about medicine was taking the unknown into consideration and taking logical steps to answer the unknown.  There is a difference to the unanswerable and the unknown.  The unknown has just not been discovered yet, the unanswerable is undiscoverable.

Lately I've been a little distant to everyone - at home and in cyberspace.  My mind has been drifting in and out of trying to decipher what is unanswerable and what is unknown in my life.  Let's not beat around the bush, death is a constant topic in my head.  It has many faces - intriguing, scary, romantic, lonely, fulfilling, painful, freeing...and I have ventured into analyzing all of those faces.  Still though, no answers.  The question of death is unanswerable and I logically know that trying to answer it will bring me no closer to a solution than if I just concentrated on living my life.  My needing to know what death is, is this perception of control that I'm trying to wrap my head around.  I used to think that life was an equation that I had control over:
hard work = reward
healthy eating + exercise = healthy body
kindness given = kindness received
bad action = punishment
...but life isn't so black and white.  There are unknowns and unanswerables that factor themselves into the equation, and that perception of control over our own lives gets thrown out the window.  2+2 doesn't always equal 4.

One of my first blogs I mentioned my quest to define Fate vs. Destiny.  One thing I know for sure, the definition to Fate and Destiny is an ever changing definition that grows and evolves as your own life experiences grow and evolve.  My new addition to Fate v Destiny is an age old philosophical question of how much control do we actually have over our own lives?  If our paths are predetermined then does it really matter what choices we make?  If I am supposed to die from cancer then why bother going to treatments?  I think I can say that I was fated to have this disease, but it is not my destiny to just lie down and succumb to it.  My destiny has not changed, and it is still forming before me as I continue to put one foot in front of the other on this life path.  There are things that get added to our lives that we can not control, I'll call it the 5 Factor, and trust me, you can spend a lot of time pondering "how" and "why" you are looking at a 5 instead of a 4??

It's really hard to stop focusing on that 5 and remember that it is not important.  Our lives are all going to end the same way - some of us get to know ahead of time how we are going to go out, some people get no warning and then they are gone.  What matters is how we live our lives while we are here on this earth and also remember that this earth is not our last stop. I struggle with this feeling of impermanence every day.  At some point we will all graduate to that next step and we must still strive to be good, and honest, and hardworking, and compassionate, and giving as all of these traits will carry over into whatever is next for all of us.

This feeling of impermanence does have it's advantages...really.  The sky has always been beautiful to me, but there is something else there that I can't quite explain.  It's almost like an additional dimension, or angle, or shimmer that was always there but I don't know if I consciously noticed it.  The ocean has always been mysteriously alluring to me, but now it has an added sense of familiarity - like I don't know what lies underneath the water, but I feel connected to that mystery.  The sound of the wind folding the leaves of the palm forest has an  added crispness to it, the moonlight illuminates the trees and water with a brilliance that I can't remember if I've seen before...how is any of this bad?  This is all part of the 5 Factor.

Talking about these unanswerables and unknowns is an uncomfortable subject, I know.  It helps me to be able to put this taboo on the table so that I don't carry it around in my head alone.  I feel this strength inside of me and this will to fight for my health, so it's confusing to know that I have such a serious diagnosis.  I feel the future, I have faith that everything is as it should be, and I hope that we can all learn to slow down and appreciate both the life we are given and the life we make for ourselves.  2+2=5 sometimes.

Love,
Denise