I get high with a
little help from my friends
Gonna try with a little
help from my friends
- Lennon &
McCartney
I may possibly be as lazy a fellow as you will ever
meet!
Laziness is like a chronic disease. It comes on almost
imperceptibly, until it has you squarely in its clutches. As it is with most
chronic disease, it is amazingly easy to do nothing about it – until it is very
late in the game.
The paradox, of course, is that the ease with which one does
nothing brings with it a free-floating anxiety leading to a sense of
meaninglessness. In other words, the effects of chronicity get worse.
For my disease, I have found a lovely medicine that
seems to help most of the time. The treatment? Duty! Duty, the sense of
commitment, loyalty, faithfulness and even obligation is a powerful prescription indeed.
Take a moment and think about one or two things that have
brought a sense of satisfaction to your life.
I doubt you thought of a great
party, special vacation taken or rock concert you attended. Chances are
overwhelmingly good you thought about difficult tasks successfully
accomplished:
- Surviving the war
- Raising children
- Finishing school
- Building a small business
- Overcoming a difficult relationship
- Remodeling a car
- <Fill in the blank in your life>
Duty…one of the great motivators in the journey of life.
A little
understanding…
In medicine, chronic disease is NEVER cured, it is simply
managed to minimize its effect on life’s activities. I have learned to use duty
to manage my chronic cognitive disease!
To understand this more fully, consider profound Parkinson’s
disease. I am intimate with this, because my father suffered the throes of this
progressively malignant illness the last 20 years of his life. It is a horrible disorder that slowly robs one
of conscious motor control, while leaving them with pretty much intact
reflexes. For example, they may not be able to more than shuffle on flat
surfaces, yet walk almost normally on rough sidewalks or pavement. They may
have great difficulty lifting their arm to grasp something, yet if you toss
them a ball; they will reflexively and quickly reach out and grab it.
In the latter stages, some people are unable to even take a
step forward while standing. A phenomenon of Parkinson’s is that if you place
something in front of them on the floor, they will reflexively step right over
it. By placing small objects sequentially in front of someone so afflicted,
they are able to move from one place to another.
Chronic laziness
management…
This brings me to ‘duty’ the small item that when placed in
front of me, causes an almost reflex reaction to an event or circumstance I
would NOT be able to perform on my own.
It works like this. I accept responsibility for a
task...presentation…paper to write. I would NEVER, left to my own devices, be
able to proactively take them on without having committed to them and utilizing
duty to get them done!
Every single time, regardless of past experience, there is
an uncertainty as to whether the task will be completed, yet there is the
confidence that my old companion duty will be right there on my shoulder using
whatever tools it might need to encourage, cajole, seduce or condemn me to get
a move on and complete the mission.
Left to my own devices, I would have found myself rudderless
in life’s uncharted oceans…an unwired brain treading water with not a single
idea of the direction to go…drowning in confusion and self-doubt.
BUT – and it is a gratefully big BUT! Duty was there…has
always been there, and for that I am grateful indeed.
I am certain God knows how to take care of wayward souls,
and I am equally certain when He throws a life raft it is important to make the
choice to climb in. I am further certain each of us has unique needs and
require custom tools for our lives…for me it has been duty!
There is little doubt I suffer from a significantly chronic
case of laziness…While duty may have cured nothing, it has certainly reduced the friction
of the journey.
Amen.
ReplyDelete