Toying With Life

The next moments are prolonged for our immediate gratification. As we push the limits of serious expression with the next occurrence designed to surprise.

I want to know those close to me see family and life and love in a similar light. There is something about feeling responsible for someone's mental illness which deigns to keep at bay the natural resplendence of life's mysteries. We become obsessed with categorization of symptoms and traumas encountered along the way to wholeness.

The anguish I have felt through watching the suffering someone else has had to endure is real enough. I know this person is a product of the deadly combination of genetics and life circumstances. It is an ordeal in everyday life for us who only play witness to events. This frightening roller-coaster of the mind weighs on none more than those who actually suffer the mental kinesthetics encountered.

Mental illness is real and it is treatable. So often the only answers given by the medical establishment  focuses on medication of one kind or another (and believe me the loved ones of the sufferers are glad to have them). When you watch a schizophrenic's life collapse for some bad decisions and lack of communication you want the ride to go more smoothly in the immediate future following the downfall.

But there has to be more spiritual path to recovering that which was stolen. Along the road lessons were learned from the proverbial school of knocks which should have been instructive. Are insufficient brain-chemicals across faulty nerve gaps and non-firing cells the entire answer? I hardly think so. How many times does the person have to keep falling and suffering from the same mistakes made over and over?

As I've witnessed the events that kick this young man around time after time, the paranoia, and the broken spirit in evidence, it never ceases to amaze me that I can continue to want to believe in the guy and hope for his present and future learning potential. Maybe hope is part of the spiritual component of the ultimate answer to this kind of dilemma?

Prayer is powerful, as most of us know, as is forgiveness; the latter equally so perhaps. So as I continue to listen to him rant from the hospital about me and how things are stemmable from my problem, not his illness, but my lack of confidence in MYSELF (for his imaginings extend to everything; percieved problems with my wife and the rest of the family - especially my negative attitude - are causing distortions in HIS positive reality).

But on the surface here at home all is harmonious and I suspect strongly these thoughts are another form of guilt-tripping on the happiness we feel. When he encounters trouble - we suffer here and probably none more than I do. But this diatribe is more about what is to be done with the circumstances. How can better decisions be made on the edges of these terrible events?

So the term I keep hearing in my mind is starting over from scratch. He toys with his mind, his life and indirectly all of his familys'  too. For we see him as he is and accept him also as he is. He accepts nothing and continues to struggle. We love and love and love and things improve only marginally and ephemerally. Yet life continues as does learning...and therefore hope.