For months, I have considered blogging. Today, I decided to go beyond consideration and to become proactive. It's time to start checking off the things I'd like to do and to do them!
This morning, I woke up early, did around 45 minutes of yoga, followed by one hour of the Vipassana meditation technique. In fact, Vipassana is my motivation for beginning this blog. Vipassana means to see or view reality as it is, therefore the title, "Clearly As It Is." After learning this technique, and trust me, I am simply a beginner, I have found the strength to begin looking at the truths of my life. That is, I can now regard the facts of life as they are and not simply as I'd like them to be. For starters, I feel so much more peaceful about my relationship with my father. For years, I have wanted him to be a certain kind of father. Before he and my mother divorced, I also found myself wishing he'd been a different kind of husband to my mother. But the reality is, my father is and has always been a man with his own hopes and desires. My wanting him to be something else has no true bearing on the reality of who he is. It's strange how this epiphany helped me to feel calm, given that the realization was that he would never become the image I projected him to be in my mind. But in some strange way, I found this freed us both from having unreasonable, or unrealistic expectations. As I continue this blog, I will look for truths in my day-to-day life, and I will talk about them.
My truth for today involves a commercial campaign that I noticed this week. It is an American Cancer Society (ACS) campaign with the slogan "More Birthdays." In theory, this is a great campaign, but the end of the commercial spot made me realize how clueless the ACS is. As a cancer survivor myself, I am very sensitive to any stories involving the disease. A reality of cancer is that it thrives off of sugar. Cancer patients (and survivors) should be very careful to consider the amount of sugar (and carbs) they consume in their diet. To indulge in sugar is to feed the cancer. At the end of the ACS commercial, an actor is seen carrying a large birthday cake covered in sugary frosting and adorned with candles. I found this imagery irresponsible. One of these days, in the near future, healthcare will cease to be a money making industry, and toxic treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation will disappear. This is how I see this truth, clearly as it is.
