Roller Coaster

Ah yes Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. It's a name that does not roll off the tongue particularly easily. It's an always fatal lung disease that gets progressively worse. It's a bummer.

So you wake up one morning and you can't breathe? Well, not exactly. Every person is different. It's kind of like English grammar - the rules have exceptions. Sometimes your breathing is OK and other times it's not. Gradually the “breathing is OK” turns to "sort of OK", then "sometimes bad", "sometimes real bad" and then it will slowly reverse itself and go the other direction - sometimes completely, but temporarily, sometimes not.

A while after you get the news, everything will be heightened - in neon, three dimensional, with exclamation points. Your senses, your emotions, your moods, your feelings. Everything. Maybe that's because you are dying. Maybe it's because you notice you are breaking - almost all of the time you notice it. You are breaking because of your breathing. Always your breathing.

It is as though you are reading a book and thought you were paying attention. Suddenly, although you remember what you read, you realize you weren't paying attention at all. And now you start to notice everything you read. In fact, you are reading it and writing it at the same time. You know what the ending is, but you continue to read-write with a higher consciousness than you have ever known. You own this book. This book is you.

Oh, but yeah, you are in a daze about it too and don't notice, hear, feel, anything. Nothing at all. Partly that is because your mind is somewhere in the past. You are living in the past because the past is now. In fact, everything is now. It is as though you see things, but others can't see them. It is as though you can see life and death at the same time. About then you realize you are alive and dead and the movie title makes more sense to you than it ever has - dead man walking.

Maybe that is what Zen enlightenment is like. Everything and nothing. Alive and dead. All at once. Nothing at once.

Maybe that is why this now popular thingy "just breathe" is so annoying and right on at the same time.

Does that make sense to you? I hope on some level, you can feel what I am writing. You can sense it. I don't think you can understand it - well, I know I can't understand it anyway.

Note: I am not a doctor or an expert on Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. I am just a guy who has that disease.