MS – multiple sclerosis
I want us to talk about this illness. Rushing through our daily lives, content or discontent with our existence, we do not pay attention to the things that can make us happy. We often do not realise how precious it is to be healthy, to be able to move around freely, to take care of our children, to work. We take health for granted as something natural, without stopping to think how precious it really is. Until the moment we sense that something in our body is not right. Illness makes us slow our daily rhythm a little and look for the things of value in life; it seems to change the angle from which we look at the world around us. Perhaps it will make us love ourselves a little more, listen a little more to our intuition, notice the beauty with which each new day greets us.
The illness affects every sphere of our life. It influences our self-awareness, our professional plans and our relationships with our partners, and this not infrequently leads to a psychological crisis of the personality. This crisis is often born of the fear of the unknown, which we find hard to overcome.
What is the key to learning to live with our illness? To learn to live with ourselves, with our body, knowing ourselves much better than before. This can be a starting point for getting to know ourselves better. To look within ourselves for new resources for coping, to pay attention to ourselves, to love ourselves, to get to know and to love those close to us. Because love has nothing to do with illness. Illness cannot decide whom and how we love, and who loves us and how. We can discover what makes us happy. Perhaps until now we have not been able to, or have not known how to discover our own world; perhaps we have not had the time for it. Now we can stop, look around a little and improve the quality of our life. Honestly, without unspoken words and feelings, but with a lot of love for ourselves and for those who love and support us. You may find new interests that you did not allow yourself to pay attention to before, because they were not enough of a priority in your pursuit of “great happiness”. Great happiness may sometimes turn out to lie in a series of small things that we have not noticed, absorbed as we were with our eyes on the horizon.