Single days

I don't quite know the right analogy for it.

It's something like a long walk composed entirely of single steps. We know of course that each step is simply part of the walk, but imagine seeing things from the point of view of that one step. Imagine you are a step, you whole universe consists of moving the left foot a few more inches forwards, towards... what? Something, surely. Else why move the left foot at all? So there is a sense that there is something bigger, but nothing more than that. From our point of view, each step is insignificant; what is important is that we get to the coffee shop before it closes. We almost never give each individual step a second, or for that matter, a first thought. It's almost impossible for me to imagine what the would would look like from the point of view of one step.

But maybe it's more like the first time I knit a sweater. Every five or six stitches I would stop, get out the measuring tape and see if I was there yet. Each individual knitted stitch seemed so improbably minute; I felt I would never finish the project. Sometimes, it felt like the fabric was getting smaller with each stitch. It was an impossible task better suited to Sisyphus than a novice knitter. Yet, some unknown faith held me to the task - even the many occasions when I tossed the whole endeavour in the trash out of pure frustration, something coaxed me to fish it out again and knit one stitch more.

What am I saying? I think it is that we are use to seeing the world in larger sections: a walk rather than a step, a sweater in the making rather than one knitted stitch. Or at least, I am use to seeing the world this way. It is a very teleological way of looking at one's life and as I get older, I am realizing that life isn't like that after all. Life is one day, repeated differently.

I keep a journal of my Lyme symptoms, medications, supplements, &c.. This way I can see how I was doing a week ago, what medications work and what dosen't. Even so, I didn't know how I am doing. Each day seems the same as the day before and the day after, only doing different things. When I'm having a bad day then all days are bad days, when I'm doing well one day, then all days I am doing well. It's one of the 'blessings' of a fading memory.

That dosen't really make sense, not when I look at it during the rare moments when my academic brain comes to visit me. But that's the thing about a broken brain, it leads to an irrational mind where the connection between past and future is lost and all that there is is today. The present becomes the archetype of all moments and I live a life of single days.


So my journey towards good health is a series of single days. This will, I am told, end in a few years, or at least, come to a point where I can live a life again. I want to believe it, but I just cannot see it. I envy people who have faith in God, I would love to live my life with the comfort that great faith brings; but right now, I would settle for the smaller faith that keeps you walking one more step, that keeps one knitting one more stitch, that little faith that keeps us believing that the sun will rise again.