Dear Readers,
This post is not a usual one for my blog, it is only about spiritual atheism in a very theoretical way. Rather, it is more of a reminiscence, probably btought on by a surgical procedure I went through last week. Waking up from the anaesthetic was not an easy process, I am told. No matter what the doctors did to wake me up, the typical response from me was about 10 seconds of speech, then falling right back to sleep mid-sentence. I was in the recovery room the same length of time as I was under the anaesthetic. And when I did finally wake up, in my head were thousands of little memories I had all but forgotten. They were a sort of history from my first year of school to my years as a hippie. The saddest thing about this memory, except for my own family, I now know no one from that entire era but myself. Friends, acquaintances, school chums, bullies, sports teammates, even the authoritarian voices in my early life, all gone, almost completely forgotten… Until now. The ones I miss most were my hippie friends, first those from Winnipeg, and then those I met in Toronto, but mainly in Vancouver. These were the people among whom I came to best know myself, to discover myself, which set me on the path I have been on for fifty plus years. This is NOT their story.
Nor is it anyone’s story, really, just a quick trip back in memory to a time when every song had a particular memory, and there were thousands of songs, and thousands of memories, until the memory bank got so full the earliest memories had to be archived to make room for the new memories flowing in to take their places.
You can’t remember anything from previous lives, or at least nothing meaningful? Don’t worry, the memories don’t need to be remembered in order for you to know their effects on you. You are the sum of your experiences, even if you cannot remember the experiences themselves. You have done much learning. Don’t stop now.
Look! There’s a new memory on the horizon. Go to meet it. It will soon be yours.
“All we are saying is give peace a chance…”
A New Spirituality 
Good to see you writing again …
Sometimes I find myself missing the old … friends, places, experiences … but then inevitably my thoughts turn to things I wish I had done differently, mistakes I made, and then I think it’s better I stay in the present and look toward the future. The past made me who I am, but its work is done now … time to move on.
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Never be sorry for things you did wrong, Jill. Now you know better. If you had done everything right, you would not have learned those lessons.
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True, and then I wouldn’t understand how others often fail. If we learn by our mistakes, and I think I mostly have, for now I make all new mistakes, then I should be wiser than I am!
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Who knows how wise you are, or are not? When you start feeling wise, that’s questionable. When you start acting wise, that is when you are growing wiser. But really, what is wise? Is it having all the answers? No, it is knowing how to live so you don’t hurt others, or yourself either.
One can be wise about a lot of things, but real wisdom will always shine through. Help others to become wise, not by teaching them, but by being an example for them.
Wisdom cannot be taught–it can only be learned…
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Like the rest of the world, I suppose I am wise in some things, but not in others. If you had seen me doing battle with my hand vacuum today, when it ate my hair and smacked me in the face, you might have had just cause to question my wisdom! I now look like somebody punched me in the cheek! ;) I would say I am now a bit wiser, for I have learned a lesson, but … it isn’t the first time it’s happened, and apparently I didn’t learn a lesson then.
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Try and try again, lmao. Losing a fight with a vacuum cleaner. Poor you.
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Yep … you’d think I would learn, wouldn’t you? Tonight I look like I lost a fight to Mike Tyson! Oh well … tomorrow’s another day!
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Just read this post rg… And I can relate. I think anesthetic procedures don’t always work as intended. In 2006 I didn’t wake up after a small surgical procedure at 2pm. Apparently, nurses dragged me around along with a drip line attached, trying to get me to walk or do something physical. They had to sit with me monitoring life signs until 9pm when I finally came back into conciousness and slurred that I needed to go for a pee. The nurses left the room. Apparently they stayed longer than their shift and were off like a shot, notifying the night nurse on their way. The night nuse found me dancing with the drip stand, off to the toilet down the corridor and disentangle me first. She helped me as I was disorientated and groggy. It was a long time to be under, and after I had relieved my bladder, I fell back into bed and slept another 9 hrs. I don’t remember memories, but I did feel very out of body at the time. 👀😶👻
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I am not surprised. It was nice the nurses waited for you to wake up, but I’m betting you still felt abandoned, if you could feel anything, with their sudden departure. Waking up is a process. They should at least have gotten you to the bathroom before they left…
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Yeah. They just said, “we have been trying to wake you up for hours.” Maybe I was still a bit slow to speak while my mind thought about how to go and relieve myself. 😂😂😂
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Believe it or not, you actually fared better than me. I went for major surgery at 7 AM. It was supposed to take about 6 hours. How long it did take I don’t know. My entire colon had been removed, and though I had a catheters inserted in me, I also had an ileostomy bag that that interrurpted the entire process. When I finally woke up around 3 AM, I didn’t have to pee, but my bag was full to overflowing. There were no nurses around, and the orderly refused to help me. He wanted no part of a bag so full it was going to explode. I fell back to sleep, and it wasn’t till shift change at 7 AM, 24 hours after I wss put to sleep, that my problem was discovered. The bag had exploded all over me, and my ostomy opening had been compromised. The orderly got fired, big deal, but he had not reported my condition to anyone, so no one else took any responsibilty. 25 years later I am still having problems from that one night. But I told you more than I expected. Really, I just wanted to mention the first 24 hours.
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Oh, I am shocked at your total lack of care. That is a terrible thing to happen. No wonder you almost died. I can imagine that it has left you with terrible issues. 😞
No, my little escapade was just a warning to me that I may not fare well in operations.
Not to pry, but was your colon removed because of cancer? I imagine that you feel quite speculative about your life since. 😶
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No cancer, ulcerative colitis that took so long to be diagnosed it spread throughout. My symptoms are always weird, they never follow the general patterns. Doctors can’t cope with that. They read symptoms as they appear, no matter how much I tell them to look in the opposite direction. I can’t get knee replacement surgery right now because my arthritis is so bad I’m not worth the effort. Isn’t that a great thing to be told.
Yeah, my care could have been a lot better, but it is what it was. Humans are human. They aren’t perfect, and neither am I.
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Oh.😞
I guess they didn’t know as much about colitis back then. It can be controlled by diet (and sometimes improved) but the medical standard is still to remove the colon. Do you still suffer with effects of it? I’m thinking that you still have your small intestine (ileum) intact?
https://nutritionfacts.org/2018/01/16/how-to-treat-ulcerative-colitis-with-diet/
This is only one source of many
approaches to colitis. And it seems to take dairy and sulpher compounds into account. I cannot eat either. And it wasn’t this article that told me I had problems… My bowel did and so do my joints. I cannot tolerate the sulpher compounds in eggs, onions, or meats. I actually start to seize up if I eat eggs (arthritic pain cripples my ankles) I end up in the toilet rather quickly, if I eat onions. (Both are high in sulpher). If I am prescribed a sulpher based drug, I break out in a rash and my gall bladder goes mad. I usually end up vomiting. I have discovered this over many years. Most people find sulphur a beneficial nutrient, but for a small percentage of people, it is the reverse. Strangely, I love omelets and fried onions… But I must not eat them. Neither can I tolerate wheat gluten. I avoid it too. Gluten avoidance helps some colitis sufferers, but not others.
You don’t have to be Vegan to avoid trigger foods, but I think it is advised to cut down on meat to just a little consumption because of the sulpher compounds formed during digestion. The same with too much fiber. (Although I eat plenty of fibre with no problem unless it’s excessive).
I am not suggesting that what helps me, might help you, but experimenting with diet has been really useful for me to eliminating arthritic pain and bowel problems that were plaguing me. Interestingly, my sister and her daughter (having similar problems) have followed a lot of my diet change but independently… They never asked me about my diet.
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Forgot to say that Celiac disease, Chrohns, and IBS seems to be quite prevelent in my relatives.
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Sorry to hear that. Out of 10 kids, only two of us had bowel problems. My oldest brother died 15 years ago of complications. So far I am still hanging on.
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I have been playing with my diet for years, and it changes whenever it wants. Mind you, I have no colon at all, so that comes with problems of its own…
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I’ve never gone under anesthesia so I don’t have that in my experience bank. Sometimes I awaken in the morning feeling strong nostalgia for my friends in San Jose and San Francisco, California. Some have died, some are past memories, a few are still friends. That said, the ache of nostalgia sometimes feels like a black hole.
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I have been under anasthesia so many times I cannot count them, the first one at about 6 years old. And it seens every exit from snasthesia is different. One day I swore up and down someone left a pair of scissors or a scalpel in mt, I had a solid mass in my stomach area that felt sharp every time triedvto change position. I screamed my head off. But thry took me to Xray and said nothing was there. The feeling lasted for 3 days, then went away.
I am sure you already are, but thank your body for never needing surgery that required you to be put out. I have heard horror stories from others, but the one time I has surgery with a lical abathetic, working on my knee, I hated not bring fully out. I heard voices, doctors talkibg I guess. They sounded like conspirators wanting to torture me. And I could not stop the vouces till it was over. I decided there it was best to be totally out, whatever the waking up put me through!
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