Drawing A Line In The Sand
I’d like to believe you can draw a line in the sand and quarantine the past and the present from contaminating the future. For human beings though – it’s never that simple. Depending on circumstances, temporal contamination of the future can take the form of physical, emotional, psychological, social or spiritual issues. If defined in this way, drawing a line in the sand, is an attempt to prevent personal history and current circumstances from further contaminating and wasting an already shortened life.
Though I’ve made regular attempts to implement this principle, i.e. taken a stick, drawn a line in the sand and begun moving forward in earnest, I almost always encounter a health issue that causes my past to stumble back across the line – wasting even more of my life. You might argue that chronic ill health is no one’s fault, but when you lose years, then decades of your life to medical conditions, it’s hard not to blame yourself for allowing life’s sacred essence to ebb away and rinse quietly down time’s infinite drain pipe!
So why continue to redraw a metaphorical line in the sand when I know my health will ignore my wishes, step over the line and contaminate/waste the present moment yet again? Even though I can’t regulate my health very well, I can prune all my other problems, forcing them back beyond the line and giving myself the best possible chance to move forward with the least amount of baggage. That is, maximising my chances to make a difference in the world and leave behind some sort of legacy. Unfortunately, this means working harder than most (which I know seems unfair) and “pedastooling” the underdog’s “don’t give up” attitude. Dealing with chronic illness as a separate variable to other self limiting issues needs to be internalised and needs to become ingrained in one’s constitution in order to get the most out of drawing a line in the sand.
So, if like me you can’t quarantine ill health, you can at least draw a line in the sand for a whole series of other things that limit life’s potential. For example, (quarantine and don’t allow the following back over the line or into your life) – 1. Don’t waste the little time that you do have on petty issues and petty interpersonal dynamics; 2. Don’t settle for being thrown resource/monetary crumbs off the table of the healthy and the wealthy! Demand to be paid what you’re worth and find smarter ways to make more cash using less time. 3. Never accept that you’re not worthy of living where you want to live! Find a way to live where you want and make sure your environment is bright, clean and hygienic – even if it’s just a room in a house! 4. Never self deprecate and dumb down your intelligence in order to make others feel smarter and better about themselves. Also, just because people around you think chronic ill health equates with being intellectually deficient, doesn’t make it so. People who patronise you in this fashion are just a couple of steps away from pure malevolence – so avoid them!
To sum up – no matter what your circumstances, make good use of whatever time you have at your disposal and pro-actively ignore anything and anyone that detracts from using time well! Though you may not be able to draw a line in the sand and hold back all derailing aspects of life, quarantining and leaving behind as much as possible will definitely make life more pleasant and successful. ;)
Cheers – Vasilios Theodorakis – June 2012