JgFJvBbEiLk.txt

Speaker 1:          00:02          Final rule, that's called pet a cat when you encounter one on the street and it's. It's a very. It's the most personal chapter in the book. It's a lot about my daughter and my daughter was very ill when she was, when she was a kid, but particularly when she was a teenager. She had a very terrible time of it. She had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and when she was between the ages of 14 and 16 at first destroyed her hip, which had to be replaced and then it destroyed the ankle on her other leg which had to be replaced and she walked around for two years on broken legs and she was taking massive doses of opiates and could hardly stay awake and like. And she had this advanced auto immune disease which produced all sorts of other symptoms that were just as bad as the joint degeneration but which are harder to describe.

Speaker 1:          00:49          And so it was just bloody brutal, you know, and as a test of your faith, there's almost nothing that's more direct than a serious illness inflicted upon an innocent child. Right. And so the chapter is a meditation on that. And also on, well what to do in a situation like that because everyone is going to have a situation like that in some sense, you know, because you'll be faced with illness in the people that you love and in crisis. And so it's a, it's a practical guide to coping with those sorts of things. Like in one of the things you do when you're overwhelmed by crisis is you shortened your timeframe. You know, it's like you can't think about next month. Maybe you can't even bloody well think about next week or maybe not even tomorrow. You know, because now is just so overwhelming that that's all there is.

Speaker 1:          01:34          It's like, and that's what you do. You cut your timeframe back until you can cope with it. And if it's not the next week that you see how to get through, then it's the next day. And if it's not the next day, then it's the next hour. And if it's not the next hour, then it's the next minute. And you know, people are very, very, very, very tough. And it turns out that if you face things, it turns out that if you face things that you can put up with a lot more than you think you can put up within, you can do it without becoming corrupted. And she did recover quite, quite fully and much as a consequence of our own machinations because she figured out what was wrong with her and then took the necessary steps to fix it, which is nothing short of a bloody miracle as far as I'm concerned. And anyways, part of the, the, the cat bit is I actually started by talking about our daughter who actually died at about a year ago, but he's still alive in the book.

Speaker 1:          02:30          Um, I, you know, I let people know because dog lovers love dogs and if you love cats than they think you don't like dogs and then they don't like you. So I also pointed out at the beginning of the chapter that, you know, if you want a pet, a dog on the street, that's okay too. So you don't have to get up in arms about it. But. But the idea is that, you know, you have to be alert when you're suffering, you have to be alert to the beauty in life, the unexpected beauty in life. And that's kind of what I was trying to get across with the idea of the cat. There's this cat that lives across the street from us called Ginger Ginger's, Assamese. Captain Cat's really aren't domesticated a technically speaking. They're still wild animals, but they kind of like people. God only knows why, but they do, you know.

Speaker 1:          03:11          And so ginger will come wandering over and our dog looks at her, but their friends and she rolls over on his back and seek. We used to noser a bit and then she'd kind of Mosey over and let you pet her if she was feeling like that day. And you know, you have to look for those little bit of stuff, little bit of sparkling crystal in the darkness. When things are bad, you have to look and see where things are still beautiful and where there's still something that's sustaining. No, you narrow your timeframe and you be grateful for what you have. And that can get you through some very dark times and maybe even successfully if you're lucky, but even if unsuccessfully, that maybe it's only tragic and not absolute hell, and you can do that, you know, in the worst situation you can make it only tragic and not held.

Speaker 1:          04:01          And there's a big gap between tragedy and hell, you know, there's nothing worse at a deathbed than to see the people they're fighting. The death is bad enough, but you can take that as terrible as it is and making into something that's absolutely unbearable. And maybe I think, and this is sort of what I closed the book with, is this idea, is that if we didn't all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are, then maybe we could tolerate the terrible things that we have to put up with in order to exist. And maybe we could make the world into a better place, you know? And it's what we should be doing and what we could be doing because we don't have anything better to do. And that's what the book is about. And that's the end of 12 rules for life.

Speaker 2:          04:54          Thanks.