This past week my partner fell sick — not covid as far as we know (we tested) but it seems like a more severe flareup of her MCAS. She hasn’t been this sick since her first MCAS flare when she had to be on a low histamine diet for almost a year.
I know it sounds dramatic, but the moment we knew she developed a fever it felt like our lives flashed before my eyes. I had no idea if this fever would end up to be innocuous or something more sinister. Co-incidentally I was also reading a blog of a former lawyer whose life suddenly changed because of dengue. Again these events made me feel very keenly how fragile our health and life can be.
The current instability of this world serves as a chronic perpetrator of anxiety for me. It is like we don’t really know if an event would be the trigger that cascades the collapse of civilisation, or is it just another terrible event among the many terrible events happening every day. I feel like we are living in the end times, but we don’t know how dragged out the end is going to be. There is a lot of uncertainty, so as usual I find solace in reading buddhist philosophy.
It is a pessimistic way of living, though I would insist that I am simply being realistic. Sometimes I too wonder if I am constrained by my own pessimistic biases of life and human nature. But the steady stream news and scientific research seems to be affirming my pessimism.
In many ways my lifelong pessimism is a gift. Since young I’ve been having the attitude that I am never going to know when life will change or end. So I have always sought to live my life to the fullest — as full as a depressed person can muster — often making what seemed like reckless decisions. But only upon hindsight these reckless decisions turned out to have brought so much to my life.
Living this way is very anxiety-inducing. I have not yet developed the equanimity to face reality head on. Maybe I make it sound like as though I have a choice. The truth is I just don’t have an alternative mode of operating. I just cannot seem to disassociate from reality like most people can. I would have been a monk if I had been born in a different era.
I am a person full of sadness but within me I am also growing a sense of fullness. I get glimpses of it once in a while. It is not constant. I feel like this sense of fullness is only possible because I have been living life on its edge, not having the passive confidence that there will always be tomorrow. Thankfully and miraculously my partner is on the same page so we both try to pursue this ephemeral sense that we are truly living.
There is only now. I find myself thinking this more and more these days. I cannot make long-term plans. Sometimes I plan for a trip merely a couple of months in advance and it makes me nervous. Will I be able to go? I don’t know who is suddenly going to get sick these days.
Sometimes I question my sanity but there is a part of me that knows. Life has proven me uncountable times that things always change. There is no sense of safety. Maybe it has to be this way, at least for me. If safety is guaranteed would I be inclined to do the things I have done?
Perhaps it is not a bad way to live like there is no tomorrow (coupled with some moderate sense of responsibility). Even if we do make it to a ripe old age, this would propel us to live mindfully and fully instead of being on autopilot. This is how we have loved each other for the past 9 years, and it is because we have loved this way, there is also that sense of fullness in our relationship.
There is a poignancy when there is no guarantee of tomorrow. It brings us closer to the moment. We both feel like we have had a good nine years together that we can be truly grateful for, so if shit was to really happen it would feel like at the very least we did experience a lot. To ask for more would make us seem greedy. This seems like a good position to have, living in a world like this. To know we’ve tried to give it our all.
