Pet a Cat When You Encounter One - Akira the Don

My daughter was very ill

She had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis

And when she was between the ages of 14 and 16

It first destroyed her hip which had to be replaced

And then it destroyed the ankle on her other leg which had to be replaced

She walked around two years on broken legs

And she was taking massive doses of opiates

She could hardly stay awake

And she had this advanced autoimmune disease

Which produced all sorts of other symptoms that were just as bad as the joint

degeneration

But which are harder to describe

And so, it’s just bloody brutal

You know it is a test of your faith

When there’s almost nothing that’s more direct than a serious illness inflicted

upon an innocent child

But what to do in a situation like that

Because everyone is going to have a situation like that in some sense

You know you’ll be faced with illnesses and the people that you love

And one of the things you do when you’re overwhelmed by crisis

Is you shorten your time

You can’t think about next month

Maybe you can’t even bloody well think about next week or maybe not even

tomorrow

Because now is just so overwhelming that that’s all there is

And that’s what you do you cut your timeframe back until you can cope with it

And if it’s not the next week that you see how to get through that it’s the

next day

And if it’s not the next day then it’s the next hour

And if it’s not the next hour then it’s the next minute

And you know people are very-very-very tough

And it turns out

That if you face things you can put up with a lot more than you think you can

put up with

And you can do it without becoming corrupt

And she did recover because she figured out what was wrong with her

And then took the necessary steps to fix it which is nothing short of a miracle

You have to be alert when you’re suffering

You have to be alert to the beauty in life the unexpected beauty in life

There was this cat that lives across the street from us called Ginger

Cats really aren’t domesticated

Technically speaking they’re still wild animals

But they kind of like people

God only knows why but they do you know

And so Ginger will come wandering over and let you pet her

You know you have to look for those a little bit of sparkling crystal in the

darkness when things are bad

You have to look and see where things are still beautiful

You narrow your timeframe

You’d be grateful for what you have and that can get you through some very dark

times

And maybe even successfully if you’re lucky

But even if I’m successfully and maybe it’s only tragic and not absolute havoc

you can do that

You know in the worst situation you can make it only tragic and not hell

There’s nothing worse at a death bed than to see the people there fighting

The death is bad enough but you can take that as terrible as it is

And make it into something that’s absolutely unbearable

Maybe I think

This is sort of what I closed the book with

If we didn’t all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are

Then maybe we could tolerate terrible things that we have to put up with in

order to exist

Maybe we can make the world into a better place

Knowing it’s what we should be doing and what we could be doing

Because we don’t have anything better to do

And that’s what the book is about

And that’s the end of 12 Rules for Life, thank you