We adopted a kitty about 12 years
ago that is now in marked decline ... with issues of hyperthyroidism, high blood
pressure, a detached retina, arthritis, hypokalemia and kidney problems. She is on six different medications, four of
which are on an alternate delivery schedule twice a day.
The hyperthyroidism, a “prime
contributor” to the whole lot, had caused her to burn extra calories and lose
half her weight over a period of six months.
To curb the weight loss, we quadrupled her thyroid meds, but that
basically reduced her “quality of life” to merely sleeping 23 hours a day.
This past week we backed off the
thyroid meds, and – amazingly – got our kitty back … almost to her full 4 hours
a day! So we’ve decided to let her live
full-out whatever time she’s got left while “burning herself up”, with
medications backed off to minimal, behavior-maintenance levels.
The experience with kitty underscored the fact that very little
is permanent in life – especially dealing with life, itself. And “Quality of Life” is much more important
to most of us than our length of days.
One learns some hard lessons about
quality of life and length of days from cancer management, where treatment can,
in many cases, at least seem to be “worse than the disease”. Oncologists constantly ponder the question of
whether or not they may be “killing the patient with kindness” by trying to
preserve quality of life and not
intervening with everything they’ve got so as to minimize side-effects.
This sort of dance … between living life to the fullest in
the present versus preserving what we can for the future … is now playing
itself out much faster than we may realize, with major political, economic and
social implications.
The new Republican regime in U.S. political control has
clearly declared NOW … and US … and prosperity at any cost … to be primary
emphases for at least the next four years.
Actually, this is not a new
theme. As individual citizens, we’ve
been doing it for years. We like to
“LIVE LARGE” … getting OUR piece of the pie while we can, running up debt and
paying as few taxes as we can get away with … and “letting the chips fall where
they may” … hopefully, as far into the future as we can keep kicking the can
down the road … for “somebody else” to pick up the pieces … if there are any
pieces left to be picked up at all.
So we’re rolling back regulations, reducing taxes for the
wealthy, running up more debt, burning our fossil fuels, bleaching the corral,
poisoning our air and water, over-fishing the seas, reducing wild habitat, opening
up national preservation lands to get more fuel, getting rid of entitlements so
that citizens can make their own free choices much more freely, etc., to “Make
America Great Again” – while we can:
BURN, BABY, BURN!
A compelling reason for such behavior in the mid-to-late 20th
Century was so that we might remain competitive with other major nations – particularly
China and Russia, but also Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico – who were brutally
savaging their own natural resources to compete with the U.S.
And “burning the furniture” to fuel development of a higher
quality of life and more profitable and sustainable framework for existence does
have occasional merit.
Richard Arkwright was a poor
barber with a Dream and a Destiny to create a machine for carding, drawing,
roving and spinning cotton goods. At
great sacrifice to his family, he acquired and applied raw materials for
machinery to make his Dream a reality.
He was ridiculed by the townsfolk, toiling into the wee hours of morning
seven days a week; his family often suffered for lack of food and clothing
while he worked at his “machine”; and “he became so ragged that he could not go
abroad in the daytime”. [Portraits and Principles of the World’s
Great Men and Women by William C. King 1897 (reprinted in 2015 by Forgotten
Books, p. 216)]
However, Arkwright eventually succeeded
in developing his “machine” and became one of the foremost British inventors
and entrepreneurs of the early 18th Century. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright
]
Fortunately, very few in the 21st century are
compelled to forego such fundamental needs to significantly advance themselves
and their families. Unfortunately, so
few feel compelled to advance themselves at all! (Doesn’t life just keep getting better?)
“Some day, my ship will surely come in and I will live happily ever
after!”
LIKELY NOT!
The COST OF LIVING requires that we burn SOMETHING … time
and energy, for sure! But the highest
quality of life – the cost of LIVING WELL – demands that we sacrificially “burn”
a lot more – including fantasies, fiction, and a whole lot of “luxuries” – if we’re
going to realize sustainable progression in the main.
Choosing what to burn and what to preserve makes us or
breaks us. Burning our potential and
possibilities in order to fuel immediate gratification is a practice destined
for ultimate failure, no matter how “good” it might feel in the present.
“We have to sacrifice ‘Good’ to get ‘Better’.”
Glen Campbell
Following a
virtuoso violin performance at Carnegie Hall, an audience member gushed to
Fritz Kreisler:
“Mr. Kriesler, I would give my very life to
play the way you do!”
[Oh? And what were you burning while he was honing his craft?]
Point
to Ponder
The most
indispensible, infinitely minable and non-consumable fuels one can acquire are
KNOWLEDGE
and EXPERIENCE.
“Consumable” resources of time and energy required to attain
and apply knowledge and experience are well within reach of every person on the
planet: Both time and energy can be conscripted from trivial pursuits, and
energy can be almost limitlessly renewed and expanded.
Bottom Line: Use your unscheduled
time and renewable energy to pile
up KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE, and then create the most purposeful conflagration you
can muster: BURN, BABY, BURN! Unlikely
Champions do it. Elite athletes do
it. Astronauts do it. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_(book)
] Now YOU do it! Quartermaster
Photo Attribution
By Fir0002 [GFDL
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
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