Making tomorrow here and now

Connie du Toit is one of the few bloggers I know of who can transform being sick from the usual whining into an unusual insight. Traveling in India, she suddenly came down with a severe case of bronchitis with high fever and migraines -- something which, while terribly inconvenient in the states, "became urgent and something to panic about here." Yes, having high fevers in a place like India is definitely urgent and something to panic about. As Connie points out, it highlights an important distinction about the way we in the First World and those in the Third World look at life. The latter view is characterized by "the acceptance that your life could end tomorrow, by any number of simple daily events, so you resign yourself to a kind of happy complacency":

It demands of you a constant state of living in the here and now. You better focus on the here and now because you might be not here and there might not be a now tomorrow.

So what does that do to a person? Well, in one sense I think it gives people a kind of peace--a kind of connection with the essence of life (and death) that we, in the West, don't have to address on a day-to-day basis. We expect miracle cures and we get them.

But on the flip side of that, it allows us to make long term plans.

I was brought up assuming that modern medical science could and would eventually cure anything. It was just a given -- something I took totally for granted, especially for young people. Sure, there was always the remote possibility that someone might get cancer, but that was pretty rare, and more and more treatable. Imagine my shock and surprise when suddenly my friends started dying like flies. From a loathsome tropical disease no one had heard of, which was eventually to be given a name which even now makes many people squeamish.

A-I-D-S

Fortunately for most Americans, this was not a disease of most normal people. Those who had to deal with it, though, found themselves with a new neighbor. No stranger to the Third World or to our medieval ancestors, this new neighbor was someone whose visits I was raised to think could always be postponed until some mythical old age moment, when we were "ready." The new neighbor was an old neighbor -- DEATH -- and while we'll all meet him eventually, when you're 20-something or 30-something, having Death as a constant presence, sitting there, always within arm's reach just over your shoulder, settling into your house, your bedroom, your very life -- why, that's a rather rude awakening by modern standards.

It does not do wonders for that all-American sense of planning for tomorrow. However, it activates the importance of what Connie calls "the focus on the here and now." That "make each day count" business. People planning for tomorrow are annoyed by the make-each-day-count types, though, and I often felt as if I was suddenly living in two cultures. Death and Life.

The irony is that I got to live. Sure, I visited dying friends in the hospital and saw "Got Aids Yet?" written on the bathroom walls, but I saw it as more of a taunt than a prophecy.

Silly me. I just wanted to die. Others weren't so lucky as to have that choice.

posted by Eric on 12.05.06 at 07:58 AM





TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/4302






Comments



March 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

ANCIENT (AND MODERN)
WORLD-WIDE CALENDAR


Search the Site


E-mail




Classics To Go

Classical Values PDA Link



Archives




Recent Entries



Links



Site Credits