Well I tried and I apologise to anyone who doesn’t agree with me, but I just couldn’t stand more than 20 minutes of it. One of the issues of being housebound is the rubbish they show on TV, not such a problem these days I agree, being as a child of the 60’s, I have been trapped by more than enough hours of bad TV to be able to have a true opinion, the “Cat in the hat” has to be among the worst of the TV I have ever seen. To be honest, I didn’t even hear of the “Cat in the hat” until a few years ago, I think I had seen things like wall charts or children with pictures of the cat on them, but the books, films and TV, I knew nothing of. When I did hear about them, it was from someone who loved everything about that “cat” and I do mean everything, they were well over the top in their feelings. Gushing recommendation from anyone never sit well with me, they usually come from people who have a limited experience of anything else in the same genre, what ever it is books, clothing, architecture or anything else, my experience of life tells me that nothing deserves to be placed that highly, once you are also aware of the others that surround it, many as good and some even better. So I have tried something new, this time it was something I wish I hadn’t, but it has added to my life experience and I rarely turn my back on those.
Through out my life I have heard on TV or in News papers of people who were well into their retirement years and had just completed a University degree, they were the type of stories that always left me with one question, why? I fully understood those who would jump out of planes, or enjoyed dangling on a bungee, but spending so much time studying when they were never going to be able to use what they had learned, totally escaped me. I had been one of those kids who studied but never saw any real point to it beyond keeping me out of trouble with my parents, when I was forced to leave school aged just 15, I didn’t even think about fighting it and I found myself a job that actually started a month before my leaving date, so the school would let me go. Those who have read for a while, already know I was a keen self learner through out my adult years and through that I managed to work my way into a really good job. When you get a diagnosis of a condition that will slowly eat your brain away, you do go through a spell of believing that learning anything new is pointless. I honestly believed that by now, I wouldn’t be able to think, far less learn but I am still doing so daily and I fully understand why so many others are too. Strangely learning isn’t about tomorrow, it’s about today, it about those moment of clarity, those seconds where suddenly something makes sense, or you can see the answer to something you have been struggling with and had had no luck with, until then. It also doesn’t matter if it is part of your life, or a subject that no one but you could be interested in, even something totally obscure, as it’s our personal growth that makes the difference. I remember hearing somewhere someone saying that they knew a person was dying as they had “lost interest in life”, I never realised how true those words were, or how easily they could actually be the cause of the end of a life.
I believe that my continued interest not just in life, but in subjects I never new anything really about before becoming housebound, is a large part of being able to be happy the way that I am. I have talked before about how important I find achieving things is, the boost it gives me and the satisfaction that I’m not totally useless, well “learning” does the same thing. I put in it in quotes for a good reason as I know that word scares the hell out of some, “learning” isn’t about maths, arithmetic or even foreign languages, it’s about everything and anything, including “The Cat in the hat”, it’s about interests, passions and life, give up on one and we will loose all the others. I hope it won’t and it may not this year, the next or the one after, but the point will arrive when I will be bed bound, I no longer see a way around that fact, yet I have started to realise that even that doesn’t have to be as black as it feels, sorry felt, as now it’s just a very dark grey. I have at last realised that as long as I have a TV and a PC that I can work, nothing that much will really have changed, yes there will be the obvious problems, but I don’t see it now as blackness, as unless my brain has left, I can still learn, still be interested in and still part of life, if my brain has left, well I probably won’t really care.
It may sound like a tiny change in thinking, not worth really mentioning or one that everyone else could see, even if I couldn’t, but to me it a big change, it’s like a new window has opened all by itself and it’s not an annoying pop-up, for once it has really important information on it, interests, passions, learning & life go on until we let go of them.
Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 31/12/12 – Years End
Two Rooms Plus Utilities 