I think life begins when you stop arguing your life, or fearing your life, or coveting the lives of other people, and simply begin living. I call this the Leap Of Faith. I am not going to make decisions out of fear or anger, but out of my own heart and soul, and my own sense of how I wish to live. What a difficult way this is to live, how much at odds it puts me with the rest of he world. I have a very healthy and vigorous friend and he has been on medications for some years now for blood pressure, cholesterol, and after his last check up, soon to be on kidney medications. He is not sick, but the doctors warn him that there are indications that he might one day be sick, so he gets a check-up twice a year and each time, the doctor tells him that one function or another is declining.

This is not a surprise to me, in my sixth decade – our systems do not generally advance –  but it seems a shock to him, in his fifth. And each time, the doctor has warned him that if he doesn’t go on medication for each of these things right now, and after weeks of expensive and unnerving tests, he could a/have a stroke, b/have a heart attack, c/contract diabetes and d/be on dialysis in 10 years. He calls and tells me these things, but he does not ask me what I think, happily,  and I do not tell him, because it is not my business and I do not know what he should do.

And because it would be a tough discussion, one he does not wish to really have. Because what I think is that month by month, he is being persuaded – for profit- that he is not healthy, and that medicine can keep him alive just about forever, and I hear him beginning to believe that this is so, and I see that a person who used to be happy is not, and his seemingly quite healthy life is now bounded by appointments, reports and terror, along with rows of pills that each offer their own particular side effects (none of them ever described to him in advance) and I feel that one day it will be so for him, that he will be unhealthy, as he is already being treated more for side affects than for any of the original potential disorders. And at a staggering cost of money, peace of mind and sense of self.

This, I believe, is not the life for me, is not a spiritual life, is not a fulfilled life. And that is what I believe, not what he should believe or what you should believe. It is not an argument or a prescription. It is just how I wish to live.

It feels more right to me each day.  And that is when life began for me. When I began making those decisions for myself and not living through the fears other people would impose on me.